First Prize at SenZation 2017 IoT Challenge


Remembering an amazing week full of knowledge & fun 

Last year, I participated in a week-long summer school called SenZation 2017 (12th summer school on IoT and its Applications), which was held at Limassol, Cyprus. I was reminded of this event now as I was asked by my lab to give some details on this IoT project competition.

To start with, this summer school consisted of various tutorials provided by people from Microchip and Digital Catapult, UK. However, the best part of this event was the training sessions and to get a hands-on training for a new IoT chipset called "SODAQ Explorer". Microchip has developed this device to be used with LoRa® technology (LoRaWAN) and to connect it with the ThingsConnected platform.

After the first day of the training, we were told that there will be an IoT project challenge for delivering/presenting an idea based on local needs of Cyprus (and a running demo) using the SODAQ Explorer chipset and the ThingsConnected platform at the end of the summer school. We also tried the message functionality from Twilio.

About the teams:

There were 5 teams having 6 members each.

Each team had international members from different labs, wherein in my (super cool) team there was one person from each of the following labs:
  • Bosch SI (Stuttgart)
  • Accenture Research (Dublin)
  • Jerusalem College of Technology (Israel)
  • Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam)
  • CYTA Telecommunications (Cyprus)
Our team won the 1st prize for the IoT project challenge!!

Idea: Child Seat Automation in Cars

We came up with an idea called “BabyWatcher” to monitor babies in the car when parent go out for any purchase (especially as Cyprus is too hot).
  • The idea was to connect the baby seat with an IoT device (pressure and temperature sensor) and transmit data to a data collection platform.
  • Plus, connect the device to the Bluetooth of the parent's phone.
  • Thus, if the parents went out of range, the device will issue an alert
  • If the parents do not respond in time, the device will send an alert to the police or some other services via the online platform from ThingsConnected.
  • This could be easily extended to include pet animals in the car using CO2 monitoring

Prize

As a prize, they gave each member of our team a SODAQ Explorer IoT chipboard from Microchip.

Winning Pics on Twitter