Nation-building apps take center stage in 9th SWEEP Awards
THREE of the best innovative mobile and wireless applications over the past eight years of the SWEEP Innovation and Excellence Awards will soon test the market as business start-ups, making that huge leap from mere school projects into commercial products that people can actually use.
“Providing these young developers the platform to create applications that help solve life’s little problems fits with Smart’s goal of harnessing technology for people to live more,” said Ramon Isberto, public affairs group head for Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart).
The all-girls team from the Mapua Institute of Technology that developed last year’s grand prize winner—Braille Cell Phone and Obstacle Detection Device will use fresh investments infused by Smart through Idea Space Foundation, Inc. to design and build a more compact and user-friendly Braille phone.
“We are planning on further develop- ing the device and realize its full potential as a useful tool for the visually impaired,” said Janiena Roxanne Dirain, a computer engineer, who is now working for Smart’s innovations center.
The two other teams that are being incubated are TimeFree, an SMSbased queuing system that allows people to make use of their time for other chores while waiting for their turn such as when they’re paying their bills of during visits to the clinic, and irace.ph, a platform for runners and organizers to interact and create events. All three are alumni of SWEEP’s yearly innovation awards.
With this year’s theme, Technology in Nation-building, 10 teams will have the chance to take home not only the big prizes for the 9th SWEEP Innovation and Excellence Awards but also the promise of having their prototypes transformed into viable commercial applications.
Ateneo’s Botika-On-The-Go is a mobile phone app that integrates medical information, inventory and medicine acquisition assistance. It is a repository of information on drug type, generic name and description; keeps track of the user’s medications, history and profile; and contains a directory of drug stores.
LowCal, also an Ateneo entry, is a diet planner and food tracker rolled into one convenient health app. “Low calorie” represents the diet planning capabilities of the app, while “local” is representative of its local food location tracking capability.
Bulacan State University’s Leptospira Bacteria Detector allows early detection of the Leptospira bacteria in human blood sample through image processing. Specimens are digitally captured and the images are sent to the database server via Cloud computing for image processing and comparison. Results will then be sent to the An- droid phone.
Switching and Monitoring System using Android in Wireless Technology (SWS.AWT) of Colegio de San Juan de Letran is an Android mobile app that acts as a wireless system that controls and monitors electrical appliances and lights at home. Apart from conserving electricity, it also lessens the risk of fire-related incidents especially when the user is away from home.
De La Salle Lipa’s Automatic Detection of Traffic Density allows the user to monitor real-time traffic situation in a certain location via image processing. Users will receive a still image of the traffic situation in the location being monitored.
De La Salle Lipa’s Systematic Market Application for Real-time Trading (SMART) is an app that allows the users to buy their groceries via the mobile phone. It allows the user to choose and pay for the groceries through the application’s interface.
Notre Dame of Marbel University’s Fly Smart allows the user to book and purchase plane tickets anytime, anywhere. Its reservation feature helps the subscriber book flights online and generates a QR code as plane ticket instead of printed e-tickets.
Tarlac State University’s Smart HEAD (Helmet Engineered for Accidents and Disasters) is a device that facilitates faster rescue of victims of motorcycle accidents via global positioning system (GPS).
University of Southeastern Philippines’s Wordify is a mobile image processing-based Android app for language translation, which comes in handy when one is visiting a foreign country or encounters words in local dialects. Its Doc Banana (A Digital Image Processing Approach for Early Banana Diseases Detection) is a mobile app that revolutionizes the banana disease detection process.