MDS Students Win People’s Choice Award at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup

May 2, 2017  1280  1280   

Sena Kim and Joshua Tanner - both in their third year of the Bachelor of Software Engineering –  have taken out the People’s Choice Award at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, along with fellow teammate MIT student Rakshit Bhaskar.  The potentially life-changing app, named Cura, provides information about patients’ upcoming tasks, and also creates a family tree which family members can set up from home using a web app.

 

“The Imagine Cup is about changing the world by using technology to solve a problem. It could be an app, website, game or a hardware device,” says Sena.

 

“With Cura, our goal is to create a platform that allows dementia patients to interact with an app to be reminded about tasks and people, without having to even physically interact with the device. There are so many technologies out there already, yet technology built around elderly people is limited because they are often not accustomed to using it. The other side of Cura is about allowing caregivers and families to connect with dementia patients by creating schedules and family trees filled with photographic memories.”

 

The Imagine Cup is the largest global technology competition for students. Teams have just a few months to work on their idea, pitch it and acquire market validation. Although the Cura team didn’t walk away with the main prize, they did pick up the Datacom People’s Choice Award and $1000 cash.

 

“It was so pleasing that the crowd liked our idea, and we are now continuing to develop the app’s core functionality. We formed partnerships with companies while working on Imagine Cup and have organised to have trial runs of our product next month. That is our goal for now, however there are so many other ways we are looking to expand the functionality of the Cura platform in the future,” Sena says.