DCU Fujitsu Innovation Awards showcase life-changing innovations

A mobile app to assist visually-impaired shoppers, a diagnostic tool to better assess cardiac disease and an online payroll self-service system are the creative innovations that have won the inaugural DCU President’s Awards for Innovation sponsored by Fujitsu. 

Presented by Regina Moran, CEO of Fujitsu Ireland, and Professor Brian MacCraith, President of DCU, the awards encourage and recognise innovative achievements by DCU students, researchers and staff.  Other shortlisted creations ranged from Focus Gum, a chewing gum to enhance cognitive function and concentration to ECOVolve, a zero emission electric vehicle for use on construction sites.

Speaking at the awards ceremony, Professor Brian MacCraith, President of DCU praised the quality of applications for the awards, “I am very proud of all the finalists here today who have gone the extra mile to deliver impact and change both within the DCU community and to the wider public.  Whether creating novel solutions to societal problems or casting a critical eye and re-imagining existing DCU processes, the range and calibre of projects showcased here today demonstrate how comprehensively innovation is embedded throughout Dublin City University.”

The three winners are:

1  Student Category
Kaylee Cherry, a final year student in Digital Media Engineering, has developed Scandroid, a barcode-scanning Android app designed to assist visually-impaired and blind shoppers.  This idea was proposed by the National Council for the Blind of Ireland to address the issue of visually-impaired people relying on touch or assistance to identify products in a retail setting.  Scandroid extracts the barcode number from the product, finds the matching product online and the information is read out to the shopper using Text-to-Speech technology. 

2  Academic & Research Category
Stephen Hearty, Barry McDonnell and Richard O’Kennedy of DCU’s Biomedical Diagnostics Institute have collaborated with industry partner, Biosurfit to engineer an antibody C-reactive protein (CRP), a cardiac biomarker which will allow more rapid and reliable assessment of cardiac disease at point-of-care.  The innovation will shortly undergo evaluation at the Coombe Women’s Hospital, Dublin and is due for commercial launch later this year. 

3  Administration & Support Staff Category
Sheila Bridgeman of DCU’s Finance Office has developed the online My Payroll Self-Service which delivers pay and tax information securely to staff desktops, translating into cost efficiencies and positive environmental impact through the elimination of paper-based payslips.

Regina Moran, CEO of Fujitsu Ireland said, “Fujitsu are delighted for the opportunity to sponsor the DCU Innovation awards. Innovation is at the very heart of what Fujitsu does. Examples include healthcare sensing solutions and next generation wireless devices and networks. We are building smart cities, developing a practical vision of human centric computing and leading the way with green server technology. To keep pace with technology led innovation we need access to the best minds so we can help our customers turn ideas into reality.   These awards showcase the brilliance that these minds have to offer and are evidence that innovation features strongly in the DNA of DCU. These awards will also make stronger graduates who have the skills and capability to thrive in our sector.”

Other shortlisted innovations included:

• Y-Path – an initiative to counteract youth obesity by developing innovative strategies to help young people become more active;
• Focus Gum - a chewing gum to enhance cognitive function and concentration;
• a Tender Review Service to improve performance of Irish SMEs in tendering for public service contracts;
• ECOVolve - a zero emission electric vehicle for use on construction sites;
• REMPAD - a web-based system to offer reminiscence therapy for people with dementia;
• Digital Innovation, Creativity and Enterprise (DICE) – a research project to encourage enterprise tendencies in first-year Business and Computing students.  Students organise free, innovation and creativity mini-conferences for industry and the general public, as well as developing apps for over 90 DCU clubs and societies;
• GURU – a user-friendly information system that assists academic management of student, module and programme performance; 
• Streamlining of the Examination Results Upload process to provide greater efficiency across the university, reducing time consuming and error-prone tasks by 80%;
• a Strategic Energy Plan which aims to reduce DCU’s energy consumption by 33% and more by 2020.