Over the weekend, inventive students across Singapore came together for Microsoft’s Imagine Cup Championship 2012, an annual competition that showcases the inventiveness, maturity and thinking amongst students across the world. Conceptualized and organized by software giant Microsoft, the event is now considered somewhat as the Olympics version of student technology competitions.
The objective of Imagine Cup is to harness the creativity and passion of students to solving the world’s toughest problems using technology. This year the winning team of the competition hails from Nanyang Polytechnic – Team AlphaWaves, which comprises of Koh Kai Wei, Eustace Zheng Xiangwen, Nur Nadiah Binte Zailani and Mong Yunheng (pictured above with Microsoft Singapore’s director of platform and developer evangelist group Ziraid Saibi and Microsoft Singapore’s academic developer evangelist Shen Yizhe) won with their idea Dementia Assistance and Recall Engine (DARE), a web-based digital scrapbook designed to capture and organize the past memories of dementia patient in a personalized digital format as part of reminiscence therapy. The idea of the scrapbook is to stimulate recall of past memories through photographs and other media (e.g. sound, video) that can be presented on a PC or tablet to remind the elderly and persons with dementia of their past and who they are. DARE even deploys an active link to user’s brainwaves to analyze and make sense of their cognitive and mental abilities to help in stimulating their recall capabilities.
“Technology empowers the individual to make the world accessible according to their own needs,” says Nur Nadiah Bte Zailani of Team AlphaWaves, champions of Imagine Cup Championship 2012. “Build on Windows 8 and Windows Azure, the aim of DARE, as part of reminiscence therapy, is to stimulate recall of past memories through photographs and other media (e.g. sound, video) that can be presented on a PC or tablet to remind the elderly and persons with dementia of their past and who they are. DARE will have an active link to user’s brainwaves to analyze and make sense of their cognitive and mental abilities to help in stimulating their recall capabilities.”
The team emerged triumphant out from over 85 entries, judged by a panel that includes managing director of Microsoft Singapore Jessica Tan, Jeffrey Paine of Golden Gate Ventures (and an adviser to Young Upstarts), Gwendolyn Tan of fellow Singapore-based entrepreneurship site SGEntrepreneurs, and Bernice Ang, founder of Syinc. Team AlphaWaves will travel to Sydney, Australia, this July to represent Singapore in the worldwide finals and showcase their innovation alongside hundreds of other students from around the world.
