UoA student team wins Award of Excellence at "From Kobe to Silicon Valley!! Student Business Plan Contest"
Information
お知らせ
On Saturday, July 4, 2015, final selections for the "From Kobe to Silicon Valley!! Student Business Plan Contest" (*1) were held at Design and Creative Center Kobe (KIITO) in Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture. There, University of Aizu student team Gruner Star won an Award of Excellence. The team members included Yuta Sugii, Shoma Saito, Seito Yamamoto (all 2nd-year undergraduates), and Kotaro Maruyama (3rd-year undergraduate). Some 50 teams participated in the contest, with seven teams making it to the final selections. Further, one of these teams was selected to receive the Grand Prize, while two teams received Awards of Excellence.
The project that the team presented at the contest was their "Eye Checker" mobile application for self checking and early detection of glaucoma, a serious eye condition. Glaucoma is one of the most common eye conditions to strike middle aged and elderly people. Glaucoma causes a narrowing of the field of vision due to optical nerve damage, and can lead to blindness if not treated in time. Despite the fact that early detection is vital to treatment of the condition, it has almost no discernible symptoms until it has significantly progressed. Therefore, regular eye exams are the only preventative measure. Because "Eye Checker" can be used to easily check for the condition, it is expected to be highly effective at preventing glaucoma.
Developed primarily by team member Shoma Saito, "Eye Checker" took the Application Division prize at the "Medical × Security Hackathon 2015" (*2) held over the weekend of March 7-8, 2015. The application was continuously improved after the hackathon, and team member Yuta Sugii gave a presentation on how it could be developed as a business. Looking back at the contest, Sugii commented that "Conveying the appeal of the product we have developed to business managers and other non-technical people is something that will be required of technicians, who more and more required to be creative. These sorts of opportunities require us to learn outside of the UoA, which is a place for improving our knowledge of computers. I am very glad that we were not only able to learn through this contest, but also able to have some strong results."
The team plans to continue developing "Eye Checker" in cooperation with Eyes, JAPAN (*3).
The day of the contest
"Eye Checker" demo
Members of Gruner Star. From left: Saito, Maruyama, Sugii and Yamamoto.