Fifteen college teams are ready to battle to help alleviate human suffering and create a cleaner planet.
Our partners at the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance announced the 15 teams that will be exhibiting at the Open Minds event at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., next month.
Will one of these teams grow to become the next Apple or Tesla Motors?
Inventors Digest will host the NCIIA’s web video contest again this year as part of this exciting event. We’ll be posting more details soon.
Here are the teams:
CLEAN, SUSTAINABLE ENERGY
University of Colorado at Boulder: commercially viable fuel briquettes from existing seedstock waste for farmers in Guatemala.
Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Affiliated with Anna University, Chennai: continuously variable transmission system to improve fuel efficiency for agricultural engines.
Arizona State University: Gel-Fuel and The Twig Light – a clear light solution for rural Africa (a clean-buring gel fuel to replace traditional open fires/stoves in developing countries and a product developed by DayLight Solutions to produce clean electric light from waste energy.
Princeton University: Roseicollis Technologies, a social venture developing the SunSaluter, a sun ‘tracking’ system that improves solar panel energy harvesting by 40%.
MEDICAL DEVICES
Purdue University: Lyogo, a mixing and delivery technology for lyophilized drugs.
Duke University: Medici Medical Technologies, a device to address urinary incontinence in women.
Rice University: infantAIR, a nascent start-up developing a low-cost device to treat respiratory failure in children.
Johns Hopkins University: Antenatal Screening Kit, a low-cost screening kit that provides a sustainable solution for improved maternal health care in developing countries.
GLOBAL HEALTH
Georgia Institute of Technology: Sustainable solar sanitation system to commercialize a product that will eliminate unsanitary conditions in developing nations.
University of Denver: Kibera Working Group’s WATSAN solution, a research group working to improve water quality and sanitation in slums.
Tufts University: Relay Technology Management Inc., a system to integrate global health data and technology entrepreneurial solutions.
TECHNOLOGIES FOR EMERGING MARKETS
MIT: Rickshaw Bank, a venture to improve rickshaw transport in India.
Art Center College of Design: Ducha Halo, an affordable pressurized shower that helps improve hygiene in slums.
Pennsylania State University: WishVast: Building Trust and Social Capital using Cellphones, a cellphone-based social networking system that harnesses the pervasiveness of cellphones in developing countries to build trust, optimize resource utilization and facilitate people-to-people trade with the ultimate goal of alleviating poverty.
Temple University: Malo Traders LLC, a social venture combating extreme poverty and malnutrition by providing state-of-the art and environmentally sustainable storage, efficient processing and fortification technology, and marketing services to farmers and affordable prices to consumers.
About Open Minds
Open Minds (formerly known as March Madness for the Mind) is the acclaimed annual exhibition of cutting-edge innovation from NCIIA’s best student teams. The exhibition takes place each year during NCIIA’s annual conference, and is an opportunity for student teams to demonstrate their products and companies, and receive local and national media coverage. 10-15 teams are selected to participate in this high profile event, which involves an evening exhibition for NCIIA conference attendees as well as an exhibition open to the general public and an exciting video competition.
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