The finale of the India chapter of the ASME Innovation Showcase, a global competition for Hardware led Social Innovation, will be held on April 20 in Pune with three winners getting project exposure, advice and technical insights from the judging panel and prizes worth $50K and an extensive design and engineering review by an expert panel.
Launched in February in India, Kenya and USA, the competition encouraged individuals or organizations to present physical products that created social impact, and received applications in a variety of sectors including water & sanitation, health, energy, community development, economic and community empowerment, agriculture & food and safety areas.
“The ASME IShow offers participating teams a unique platform to hone both their engineering and business skills by applying them to today’s real-world challenges,” said Robert T. Simmons, president of ASME. “This competition gives these hardworking and dedicated teams the inspiration and resources needed to turn their ideas into tangible products that could someday change the world.”
Of the applications received for the India chapter, 21 projects have been shortlisted and are now participating in a social voting round that gives the public the chance to vote for their favorite project. The social voting winner will be awarded a ‘people’s choice’ prize worth $1000 and a place in the finals. These are:
* Innovative Water Saving System, which aims at solving the problem of water wastage in regular life by coming up with a device that saves water when it is not in use
* The Portable Vaccine Storage Box focuses on developing a compact temperature controlled vaccine storage device built on peltier thermoelectric cooling in conjunction with phase changing materials to bring down the rates of vaccine wastage
* WaterSHED aims to abolish the factors responsible in contributing to the problem of open defecation by providing cost efficient and quick to build latrine
* Water Wheel is an innovative solution with higher water carrying capacity to ensure reliable access to desired amount of safe water.
* To provide India with quality Healthcare solutions for communicable and non-communicable diseases, ReMeDi comes up with a Neurosynaptic’s indigenously developed ReMeDi® (Remote Medical Diagnostics) solution to scale up the access for rural healthcare
* Low-cost Portable Water Purifier for Handpumps targets to reduce the level of arsenic and bacterial content in water to prevent the community from wrath of diseases like skin, kidney or liver cancer, bone deformation or even death
* Mathukathe provides solutions for covering the demand- supply gap of laborers with the development of next gen smart coin phone.
* ONergy has come up with unique solar home system that makes solar solutions affordable, cost-effective, robust, attractive and delivering great value proposition and thereby solving the problem of sub-standardised, and inappropriately designed solar solutions with grid supply access
* BlumbangReska aims to provide innovative solution to maintain water condition of the shrimp food to solve the issue related to shrimp aquaculture.
* Super Fan is an efficient ceiling fan that has half the energy consumption of a normal fan and aims at addressing the concerns of consumers, electric utilities and environment.
* Sanket aims at health monitoring for Cardiac diseases by developing a Cloud backed cardiac ‘health meter', which is single button credit card sized device.
* Bibak’s device CANNY aims at Community involvement in demining efforts for peace and stabilization in Afganistan and have access to arable land and water.
* MiraCradle provides solutions for birth asphyxia by coming up with an affordable and non-electronic solution for cooling babies using the advanced savE® Phase Change Material technology.
* Water ATM aims to provide low cost water purification technologies so as to solve the water scarcity and pollution problems in Pakistan with the help of innovative device, Wrind.
* The current treatments methods for curing chronic illness are inefficient due to lack of Prognosis and Treatment Continuity. Therefore ReLive has innovated a portable device for Pain Management, a unique combination of personalization and technology that provides immense value to the sufferers.
* The Off-grid Cold Storage for Farmers has a solution that uses renewable sources of energy in order to solve the issue of food and milk wastage due to unavailability of proper cold storage systems.
* Desolenator provides a revolutionary technology which is an affordable and environment friendly method of water purification aimed at serving households with a lifespan of about 20 years.
* The Winter Home solution is a temporary life saving emergency shelter that can be deployed before conventional relief shelters are built. It works on the principle of keeping the room warm by trapping body heat.
* Water vending machine ensures availability of safe, low cost, unpackaged drinking water in public places.
* Compressed-Air Energy Storage (CAES) provides scalable energy storage solution by developing a module expander is uniquely positioned in the 1 to 50 kW- net electricity range in a single module.
* Zimba aims to provide safe drinking water by a point-of-collection (POC) technology at the shared drinking water source. Zimba is a community scaled automatic chlorine dispenser having no moving parts and requiring no electricity, overcomes the challenges of POC disinfection.
The finalists will be announced on April 17 and will participate in the final pitch round in Pune on April 20, in an event being organized alongside the AM3D conference on April 20-21. Three winners will receive project exposure, advice and technical insights from a judging panel that includes Noha El-Ghobashy of ASME, PR Ganapathy of Villgro and Bob Hauck of GE Healthcare.
They will also receive shared prizes worth $50K inclusive of the extensive design and engineering review by an expert panel.
“The competition is a platform for innovators to showcase their talent and creativity to revolutionise the world with their thinking,” said PR Ganapathy, President (India) of Villgro, which is the India implementation partner of this global contest.
For more information on ASME iShow, visit: www.thisishardware.org