About Us

Our Mission

Hearty Blue® provides personalized medical alert seat belt covers and accessories to help protect your loved ones with medical needs in emergency situations. Our pieces for peace will be your voice when you cannot speak on the behalf of your loved ones. Our goal is to alert first responders to you or your loved one's medical condition, and as a result assist in ensuring their safety and provide you and your family with peace of mind.

Hearty Blue's current offerings will soon be expanding to all disabilities, but please contact us to make a request prior to our product expansion. Thank you and be well!

People

Jacki Patenaude is a proud advocate for the autism community, a loving mother of four, and an inventive designer who has brought together her unending passion for protecting those with autism and her admiration for the graphic arts, to create Hearty Blue.

In 2011, Jacki and her husband Doug adopted their last child Olivia and two years later Olivia was diagnosed with autism and selective mutism.

During the settling of Olivia's 2013 diagnosis, the pieces began to come together for Jacki in becoming aware that her life's purpose is to spread awareness of autism spectrum disorder and to protect those who face the same challenges that her daughter faces, now and in the future. From that point forward, Jacki has been an unwavering advocate for the ASD community on the local level through concerted efforts with her congressman, Congressman Joe Courtney (D-CT 2nd District), as a board member of the Connecticut non-profit community health center UCFS (United Community & Family Services), and on the national level through the non-profit organization Autism Speaks as an Autism Advocacy Ambassador.   

In 2016, Jacki's worst fear struck as she received a call notifying her that both Doug and Olivia were involved in a serious, yet fortunately non-life threatening, car accident. After sleepless nights thinking of all the possible "what-ifs" and the hard hitting reality that she could not always be present to protect her daughter and husband, Jacki knew she had to create something that could assist Olivia, Doug, and first responders, should (heaven forbid) another tragic situation occur. Within a week of the accident, Jacki landed on her first solution to addressing her concerns for her loved one's well-being.

Knowing that communication is integral in any emergency situation for first responders, Jacki knew Olivia's limited speech would have to be complemented and communicated to first responders to assure safety and efficiency in such a high tension situation. As a result, Jacki created a highly efficient, low tech, high visibility medical alert seat belt cover. She inscribed information regarding Olivia's autism and limited speech on the face of the seat belt cover, and emergency contact information on the inside, using high contrast colors and large font sizes to emphasize readability and ensure that Olivia's details are communicated efficiently.

Realizing that Olivia's medical alert seat belt cover could provide safety and peace of mind to others and their loved ones, Jacki joined forces with her son Shane, a graduate of Parsons School of Design and a front-end developer/user interface designer in NYC, to share with the world the safety, awareness, and peace of mind that Jacki's product has brought to their family. From these ambitions Hearty Blue was born.