Spark Challenge 2021/22 is the first step of a long journey started with the aim of uplifting the Sri Lankan innovation culture. The competition continued for a year inspiring and guiding the ENTC undergraduates to establish their ideas in reality and solve real-world problems. After a year full of novel experiences the Finale of Spark Challenge 2021/22 was successfully held on the 30th of July 2022. Out of 10 outstanding finalists, three teams succeeded in lifting the trophy.
Phantom – Champions
Coral population throughout the world is rapidly declining due to the prevailing climate crisis and toxic human activities. Team phantom presents a robot that collects coral gametes released by coral polyps during their spawning events, and safely stores them inside. The proposed robot will automate the current process which the scientists have to undergo diving and collecting the gametes by themselves. Once collected, the gametes will be provided with the proper conditions for growth, thus increasing the effective fertility rate from 0.2% to 90% ensuring a higher coral population in the coming decades.
Axon – 1st runners up
Monitoring the depth of anesthesia contributes in tailoring drug administration to the individual patient, thus preventing awareness or excessive anesthetic depth and improving patients’ outcomes. Team Axon proposes a system which can monitor the pediatric patients’ depth of anesthesia in a non-invasive manner to assist the anesthesiologists to take clinical decisions. The presented solution is developed by utilizing the state-of-the-art hardware designs and deep learning models in which the acquisition hardware system is capable of recording, pre-processing and real-time sending the electroencephalography and electrocardiography signals of patients to the nearest computer to predict the depth of anesthesia through the deployed deep learning models.
Fixit – 2nd runners up
Water pollution is a critical issue in the modern world. Any toxic chemicals that mix with the water will severely affect the ecological processes occurring in the environment. Current monitoring methods are not facilitated enough to inform an immediate change in the condition of the water. Team Fix-it introduces a solution to this issue, a system that continuously checks the pollutant levels of water in rivers and reservoirs, and alarms the relevant authorities.
After the successful conclusion of Spark Challenge 2021/22, the next chapter of the competition, Spark Challenge 2022/23 was launched with the hope of energizing the young innovators preparing them to take up the future industry and to fight the climate change.