2017 World Finalists
2017 World Finals
Czech Republic
The X.GLU project strives to provide novel hardware and software instruments to allow diabetic patients to cope with the disease better. Diabetes is going to be one of the biggest medical challenges of the 21st century. There are currently 415 million diabetics in the world today and in 2040, the estimated number is 642 million. Diabetes mellitus is a non-curable disease with extremely large prevalence. The key for successful treatment, which means relieving the symptoms and slowing down the progression, is correct medication and discipline. Our solution consists of an innovative blood glucose meter prototype, cloud-based application and smartphone application that form a closed system. Our blood glucose monitoring solution can be used by the entire population. At the beginning, we, however, decided to focus on Type 1 diabetic children. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, correct medication and discipline is the key for successful treatment. Thus, our solution is designed with the intention to effectively become a guide during the first years of presence of the illness in a diabetic child´s life. The vision of X.GLU is to change the ingrained design of glucose meter solutions that are often bulky and not connected to the cloud. We have patented a novel concept where the glucose meter has a credit-card form factor and can be customized. From the hardware point of view, the glucose meter can be both battery-less or equipped with a battery, and powered using the NFC technology. The device is fully controlled from a smartphone and does not have any buttons and display. Thus, we can use a cheap 8-bit microcontroller to control the device. The device is extremely thin - about 4 millimeters or 0.16 inches. Our direct competitors are smartphone-enabled glucose meters. One main group are meters with wireless connectivity - Bluetooth and/or NFC. These are most often manufactured as classic glucose meters with added wireless functionality. We can compete with these solutions in terms of the manufacturing costs and form factor. Another group are USB and 3.5 mm jack-equipped (used for transmitting data) glucose meters. We can compete with these glucose meters in terms of the manufacturing costs (if the glucose meter is equipped with a display and buttons) and form factor. Also, our solution does not have any connectors that could wear out either in the device or smartphone, except for the test strip connector. Our solution offers an easy way to manage the data connected with diabetes treatment and its synchronization with a cloud. All this is performed with a special emphasis on security. When the data is stored in the cloud, it can be displayed by emergency contacts or a physician. Emergency contacts (e.g. parents) are able to check the frequency of blood glucose measurements, last location of their kids in a case of hyper/hypoglycemia and other important features. As we have mentioned above, successful treatment of diabetes depends on the user’s discipline; that is why the integration of gamification into the application is in place not only for our main target group - children, but generally for all users. We plan to implement several gamification elements, such as collecting points and badges for specific daily, weekly and long-term challenges. Our business model is based on subscription packages. Together with lancets and test strips, we are going to introduce physical rewards (i.e. toys) to young diabetics if they manage the disease correctly, based on in-app games. Positive motivation in diabetic children and newly diagnosed diabetics is crucial. Not only does it improve the quality of their life but it also transfers the financial burden on the healthcare services connected with the diseases caused by diabetes mellitus.
United States
Oculogx has a vision of transforming the logistics and supply chain industry by applying revolutionary new technology traditional problems. Our first product is PickAR, a mixed reality application that runs on the Microsoft HoloLens which optimizes the process of order picking in warehouses. Order picking is the process of finding items in a warehouse and transporting them to a new location for further processing. This accounts for up to 60% of the operational costs of over 750,000 warehouses across the world shipping over $1 trillion worth of goods every year. Already, the technology supporting PickAR is showing a 37% improvement over existing methods in our lab at Georgia Tech, and we are building a proof of concept of this technology with Wal-mart this summer to showcase these benefits in an industrial environment. Link to demo: https://youtu.be/YSjAtjUXeRc Link to our website: http://oculogx.com
Argentina
In the past 20 years, more than 600.000 lives were lost to natural catastrophes 2. The golden period to rescue trapped survivors is between six and twelve hours after the sudden impact. Despite this fact, most of the rescue teams arrive much later, thus often the amount of rescued people is minimal. RESCUE is a platform developed to reduce the response times in natural disasters. Deploying a network of economic and self-flying drones, the city is explored and analyzed in real time through a video sequence, and with the use of computer algorithms and machine learning algorithms, can be detected possible threats and immediate emergency situations, such as large fires and people trapped. In conjunction with a web platform available to suitable civil defense organization, RESCUE has a map with various markers that represent real-time emergency situations, allowing operators to detect them and react quickly, thus saving countless lives. Our goal is to minimize the number of victims and reduce costs to ensure that no region is excluded because of a lack of financial resources, so we want to be a non-profit organization offering the platform for free and the drones at their cost.
