EIT Digital Stockholm node hosted the IoTHack Challenge as part of the Digital Infrastructure Action Line's Advanced Connectivity Platform for Vertical Segments High Impact Initiative (aka HII <link innovation-entrepreneurship digital-infrastructure active internal link in current>ACTIVE). This challenge is being conducted in two stages, the first stage of which was successfully completed on 13 - 15th October 2017. The second is scheduled for 7 December.
HII ACTIVE Leader Matti Frisk said:
"The goal of this challenge is to primarily make use of the ACTIVE compliant IoT platform developed by Engineering, one of our Italian project partners, and build innovative products and solutions on top of it. This enables us to provide important feedback to the Engineering team about the performance of the platform. The first stage of this challenge attracted considerable participation from KTH students and also from various Swedish companies/startups."
After a detailed presentation of ACTIVE, its functionalities and APIs, participants formed six teams and discussed their ideas based on the theme of the challenge "Sustainable Cities" on day one.
The entire second Challenge day was spent intensely in ideation and focused on preparing pitch presentations. On the third and last day, the teams presented their ideas to a panel of judges consisting of Göran Olofsson( EIT Digital Stockholm Node Director), Matti Frisk (ACTIVE Leader, Ericsson Finland), Domenico Presenza (Engineering, Italy) and Mark Smith (Professor, KTH). The jury judged the teams based on how well they plan to use the ACTIVE platform, how innovative the solutions are, and on the general feasibility of their ideas.
Out of the six teams, the Reality Hackers team was awarded "Best Idea" for proposing an AR-VR based gaming experience solution. TheGym Note team proposed a smart way of logging personal gym training data to see improvement in performance over time, which was awarded the Best Pitch. All other teams also had very good ideas and they have the opportunity to utilise the feedback from the judges to improve their solution.
IoTHack Challenge organiser Somshree Mukherjee explained:
"All these teams will move on to the next stage of the challenge where they will build prototypes of their minimum viable product using the ACTIVE platform over the next six weeks. The final presentations for all the teams will be held on 7th December as part of the EIT Digital Stockholm Innovation Day. KTH students who will be studying the course Product Realisation Processes will also be receiving ECTS for this project as part of the course. "
The ACTIVE Leader Matti Frisk concluded:
"I was amazed to see how fast the IoTHack Challenge participants could adapt to the IoT platform and specify the needed functionality for ideas for each team. This gives a good grounding for continuing the development of ACTIVE platform functionalities and validating the concept of the Advanced Connectivity Platform for Vertical Segments."
