A Canadian startup SmartArm featuring Pakistani and Bangladeshi members have won the final of Microsoft Imagine Cup contest 2018.
Organized by Microsoft, contestants from all over the world took part in the competition where they proposed innovative solutions to the real world problems facing by mankind. A pair of Canadian students along with Hamayal Choudhry from Pakistan and Samin Khan from Bangladesh won the cup by developing a simple, inexpensive prosthetic arm for differently abled people.
The arm uses artificial intelligence and has a built-in camera in the hand that takes a 3D picture of an object and find the grip the arm requires to hold the object firmly. Then the differently abled person, by flexing his/her muscle, can ask the artificial arm to hold the object.
Samin Khan, Computer Science student at the University of Toronto explained, “Try to imagine someone has lost an arm and wants to interact with the world; it is impossible to even imagine.”
Hamayal Choudhry, a second-year Mechatronics Engineering student at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology said, “Artificial arms are present in the market, but they are very expensive or without functionality.”
Read Also: Pakistani startup Fe Amaan qualified for Microsoft Imagine Cup Semi finals
The winning startup SmartArm will receive a cash prize of $85,000 along with $50,000 in the Azure grant, a mentoring session with CEO Satya Nadella, and some other Microsoft goodies.
The team said they were looking for venture funding but now ended up getting a grant instead. They said a number of Canadian and American institutions have already shown interest and winning the Imagine Cup will certainly give them a greater prominence in the field.
Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella remarked while referring to the 49 teams from 33 countries that participated in the 16th annual Imagine Cup contest, “Technology has spread all around the world and the ambition to do amazing things with technology is increasingly being democratized and that is what really is fantastic.”
