Ericsson in association with the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) has announced the winners of ‘Ericsson Innovation Awards 2015’ at IIT Delhi. The two winning projects were: Guardian from IIT Delhi and Smart Earphone from IIT Roorkee. The two winning teams will be supported by Ericsson India financially to the extent of Rs 10 lakhs each towards incubating the winning projects at any IIT approved technology business incubators.
Ericsson Innovation Awards were initiated last year to promote the spirit of innovation within engineering students at select IITs. A total of 67 projects were submitted by IIT students from Chennai, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Mumbai, Roorkee and Banaras Hindu University (BHU).
The winning projects:
Guardian: Guardian device is a complete stand-alone personalized human security device which can use any type of communication system such as internet, SMS, or Near Field Communication to alert loved ones when in a distress situation. It also uses multiple cellular phone towers to transmit data and triangulate a victim’s position.
Smart Earphone: A new wearable device for everyone that can amplify and attenuate selective sounds. The user can decide whom/what he/she wants to selectively hear and at what volume. The device will be integrated to smartphone via an App. All the audio signal processing will be done by the App only.
“The winning projects score high in terms of parameters like innovativeness, commercial feasibility , scalability and will be supported by Ericsson through the incubation period,” said Chris Houghton, Head of Region India, Ericsson.
The projects submitted were in the areas such as web design, cloud computing, storage and networking, human-machine interface, embedded and hardware system design, MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output), machine-to-machine/Internet of Things, software-defined networking, open source, signal processing, graphics and visualization.
10 proposals were shortlisted in the month of March 2015 on criteria such as degree of innovation, feasibility, scalability and the overall impact on masses. Each shortlisted proposal was given an incentive by Ericsson to complete the initial prototype within two months. The winning projects were selected by the jury in front of an audience comprising of students, faculty, innovators and industry leaders .
