The winners of the Kuwait Global Technopreneurship Challenge. (Image via Ana Tadic)

The big questions were being asked at the Kuwait Global Technopreneurship Challenge last month, as teams built solutions for one of 14 ‘grand challenges’.

They were trying to answer questions related to local issues: how can health informatics be advanced? How can personalized learning be improved? How can solar energy be more efficient and economical?

The winning team was Legacy, with a method for reducing car accidents, which won KD 1,500 ($4940 USD).

Dream team

Team leader Mohamed Ehab was the only one who was able to travel to Kuwait to represent the team, but he said it had been a life-changing experience for all five members.

“There was a lot of work pressure, trying to balance studies with working on the project and maintaining the work progress online,” the university student said. “We were asked to do [things] we weren't very familiar with so we had to put in extra time to understand it.”

The team, all of whom are engineers, come from Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan and Wales and also included Mohanad Bajunaid, Omar Mohamed, Sartaj Khan and Naomi Randall.

Ehab said they become closer as a team as they learned how to manage their time and work as a unit.

How it works

Ehab and his team wanted to build something that would save thousands of people's lives every year, and produced a car accident automatic notification system (CAANS).

They looked at the leading causes of death globally and found that car accidents were the sixth leading cause, as emergency services take a longer time to reach a scene due to traffic or other issues, and careless driving such as speeding caused a third of all accidents.

The CAAN works by gathering data from sensors that are either pre-built in cars with airbags or retrofitted into older models.

The data gathered is then analyzed and when an accident is detected a call is put through, via GSM technology, to the emergency departments needed, establishing the severity of the accident and its location, as well as to any individual the driver has chosen to enter into the device.

“We also wanted to address the speeding challenge especially among teenagers, and with our device we would be able to monitor the car speed and based on it send a notification to parents, or any other number pre-installed on the device,” he said. “We aim to connect every car in the country with the traffic department, therefore enabling the traffic department in monitoring reckless drivers and possibly banning them from driving.”

Funders are more than welcome

The Legacy team has built a prototype but hasn’t tested it in cars yet, as they’re looking for funding to polish the product and get professional feedback.

“Our customers would be governments, as they would enable us to implement the product on all cars across the country and link it to the emergency departments for the emergency notifications to be received.”

They are also targeting parents, insurance companies, and taxi companies as they want the owners to be able to monitor the driving pattern of a person who drives their car.