The ceremony of the Vodafone Merit Award in Mobile Networks and Internet of Things took place on 22nd June, at Técnico – Alameda Campus. The Antiwaste project, developed by the Técnico students Jéssica Consciência and Tiago Leite (Electrical and Computer Engineering), was the winning project among three projects.

The Antiwaste project aims to fight food waste. For this purpose, a proof of concept was designed that brings together a camera, a screen that would be placed on the fridge door, and an app. When the fridge door is opened, to place or remove a food item, an image is processed and communicated to the app, which displays all the food items available in the fridge and their respective expiry dates on a list. The app will then tell the user when a product is approaching its expiry date and suggests recipes to use almost-expired food, thus contributing to reducing food waste.

The two students won the award of 1310 euros and highlighted how much they enjoyed doing the project. The session also included presentations of the two other finalist projects, also related to Mobile Networks and Internet of Things.

The students Diogo Ferreira and Tomás Maia presented the Petcam project, which consists of real-time pet monitoring, when the user is away from home. Afonso Silva and André Pires presented the PillMinder project, which tries to mitigate the problem of patients with chronic diseases who forget to take their medication.

Rogério Colaço, president of Instituto Superior Técnico, highlighted the importance of the award and the partnership with Vodafone: “I would like to thank Vodafone, the students, the jury and everyone involved in the initiative. My congratulations to all the projects. It is always great to hear and see successful student projects”.

Miguel Lopes, Process Automation Developer at Vodafone, thanked for the opportunity to support this type of initiative: “This type of partnership brings together the best of two worlds: innovation and knowledge that exists in higher education institutions like Técnico. These are committed young people, and many solutions will certainly come out of here that will improve the quality of life of the people around us.”

Vodafone, a member of the Técnico Partner Network, also donated €873 to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC) to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The DEEC representative, Nuno Roma, thanked the company for its support and stressed the importance of this award for the motivation of students, as it allows them to put into practice the knowledge acquired, which contributes to solving social problems.