The Umara project, developed by a team of Master students in Electrical and Computer Engineering, was the big winner of the 2018 edition of E.Awards@Técnico, this Wednesday, December 19th.

The nine groups selected to be present at the ceremony had high standards, but exceeded expectations, demonstrating how the "Entrepreneurship" curricular unit helps to explore and transpose technical excellence into valuable ideas.

The mystery surrounding the winner was broken by Marcos Ribeiro who handed over 2000 euros to the Umara project – a solution that aims to combat runners problems through data collection. Aware of the growing importance of data analysis and running events, and even somewhat surprised by the absence of smart shoes on the market, the winning team created an inexpensive solution that will explain to the runner the mistakes they are making and which could harm their physical condition. “As we really like running and sometimes accidents happen to us, namely injuries, we took this problem that we thought more people must have and tried to understand how we could solve it”, declared André Ferreira, spokesperson for the group. “I think our secret to winning was working well as a team, doing a good distribution of tasks, a lot of research, and leaving our comfort zone”, he explained afterwards. The group presented itself to the competition with a prototype that immediately captured the attention of the jury. Still, and “in the face of strong competition”, the team of students from the Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering had some fear of the final decision. “We are still trying to figure out if we really won”, jokes the spokesperson for the winning team, who states that it is already difficult to outline the future of this idea. “We are still finishing the course, but it is an idea that could be very viable on the market. In fact, we have companies that would be interested in investing”, he shares.

The competition judges were Rui Pedro Silva (co-founder of C2C), José de Sousa (partner of Armilar Venture Partners), Pedro Carvalho (co-founder of Novabase) and Marcos Ribeiro (coordinating director of Santander Universidades).