University of San Carlos Cebu (USC)-based Team AidUSC recently scored a third place finish at the Microsoft Imagine Cup Regional Finals held in Sydney, Australia, for its development of Aqua Check, a mobile application that detects water contamination.
Team AidUSC trio composed of senior college information-technology students Danielle Ann Piamonte, Erl Joshua Arcenal and Jeremiah Valero drew raves for their Aqua Check which detects water contamination by taking a photo of a water sample through a microscope. Powered by Microsoft’s Azure Custom Vision, Aqua Check allows anyone to analyze water samples and even map the contamination location, which for the Philippines is a big step toward ensuring that all communities have access to clean and potable water.
“We used to focus on solving specific niche-type problems in our past competitions, but this time we wanted to create a bigger impact not just in the Philippines but on a global scale,” said Arcenal in a press statement. “With the increasing water contamination cases in the country, we aim to continue to improve Aqua Check and hopefully deploy our application in local government units across the Philippines.”
Competing against 11 teams from Asia Pacific, Team AidUSC has been joining multiple national innovation and start-up competitions since high school. The team was motivated to develop the solution for water contamination after coming across an article about the diarrhea outbreak in the biggest prison facility in the Philippines, which affected over 1,200 inmates and killed two because of water contamination.
Water is regarded as one of the most critical natural resources in the world.
Unfortunately, according to the World Health Organization, around 2 billion people globally use a drinking water source that is contaminated.
In the Philippines, over 19 million lack access to improved sanitation and 9 million rely on unimproved, unsafe and unsustainable water sources. In 2013 the Department of Environment and Natural Resources shared that 55 people die daily from diseases caused by a lack of proper sewerage and sanitation facilities.
With the help of the University of San Carlos’s community extension program, Team AidUSC is introducing new innovations in furtherance Aqua Check, and plans to have the technology patented in the near future. At the same time, the team is trying to raise funds to obtain a foldable microscope and a PPNL microscope, which can bring about faster results and better insights into the technology.
Team Caeli from India and Team RailinNova from China emerged as champion and first runner-up, respectively. Team Caeli bagged the first prize with their smart automated Anti-Pollution and Drug delivery mask specifically designed for patients that are suffering from asthma and other chronic respiratory conditions; while Team RailinNova came up with Rail Component Inspection Robot, which determines and identifies rail defects through multi-sensor monitoring.