Thursday took place Demo Day within Innovation Labs 2016, and the best student teams presented their ideas and final products in front of the jury who decided the teams that deserve to be supported to turn their simple ideas into finished products.
At the National Library in Bucharest, over 100 people attended the final pitches made by the teams and saw what they managed to develop until now with the help of Orange and the mentors who assisted them in the last 2 months.
Innovation Labs 2016 gathered teams from Bucharest, Cluj, Timisoara and Sibiu, the best ideas and the most talented students having the opportunity to benefit from a mentorship program and technical help to turn their ideas into real products.
Best Business
Premium Best Business, the most important of all, was awarded by Mihai Tudor, vice-president of the Romanian American Foundation, to the team Serafim, presenting an idea that aims to support the development of agriculture by monitoring crops by farmers.
The Serafim team thought of an intelligent system based on sensors mounted on crops and drones to constantly monitor the condition of crops, farmers benefiting from real-time information on the condition of the soil, air quality, the data being collected for large areas of land and displayed in an easy-to-read interface, built using flexible computing provided by Orange Romania.
To facilitate communication between the sensors and the hub where the data is stored, Serafim uses a technology called LoraWAN, implemented with the help of Orange Romania, which has a large range and low energy consumption.
Based on the information provided by Serafim's technology, farmers can determine in real time how much the crops should be hydrated, how the fertilizer should be used and they can see aerial maps of the locations in real time, all resulting in increased crop productivity.
In a Romania where there is a need to support the development of agriculture, I believe that the technology of this segment of the Romanian economy is essential for Romania to become the granary of Europe again.
Best Product
Best product award was handed to the team by Mihnea Costoiu, rector of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest ENTy, this developing a cheaper and more efficient method of making ENT diagnoses for patients.
The medical equipment designed by ENTy allows the diagnosis of balance problems of people who work at great heights, the current solutions being large and limited only to providing visual information regarding patients' problems.
The solution to this problem is a small portable device, which is also much cheaper, displaying numerical indicators that doctors can interpret much more easily, as they are also involved in the development process of the final product.
By bringing a medical device of this kind to the market, ENTy hopes to help doctors to more easily monitor the posture of patients and to prevent the appearance of spine problems, and probably in not too long we will see the product used in Romania.
Best Pitch
At the end we have the award given for Best Pitch, Ioana Petrescu awarding it to the team Trust, which wants to bring to the market a web platform through which small farmers can organize themselves into agricultural cooperatives in order to be able to sell their products more easily in hypermarkets.
A solution of this kind was necessary in a country where the support of local products is increasingly demanded, and those from TRusT thought of a very simple system through which small farmers can use SMS to notify their partners about with product availability.
The idea of those from TRusT started from other agricultural associations created in some areas of the country, but they propose a simpler system to communicate the availability of products to collection centers, so that small farmers can focus only on making the harvest more efficient.
Coming now to the best teams in the main categories of Innovation Labs 206 we have:
- Best Agriculture - Hive Inspector – a solution for beekeepers that allows them to monitor the temperature inside the hives, especially in winter when maintaining a constant high temperature is very important for the bees' activity;
- Best Health&Lifestyle - uRADMonitor - a device capable of measuring pollution in its various forms: carbon dioxide, humidity, afla/beta/gamma radiation, temperature or pressure. The team was even awarded by Orange Romania, their solution being compatible even with the fixed or mobile hotspots of the operator, it works through LoRaWAN;
- Best Retail - squired - a solution for restaurants that allows them to offer their customers the opportunity to reserve their table from a location, an intelligent mapping system in buildings being used, the services offered can also be evaluated by customers;
- Best Cybersecurity - M4Security – that is, a secure Bluetooth headset that allows making phone calls that no one can intercept, even if the phones used to place those calls have been compromised by hackers.
Innovation Labs 2016 is in its third edition and has the people from Orange at the center, offering their help through mentoring and dedicated solutions for the development of ideas into products.
Innovation Labs is proof that there are Romanians who want to support Romania to evolve and help its talented people to bring to the market products that have the ability to solve global problems and change the lives of Romanians and many other people on the planet.
