AI rehabilitator, smart pill box... Creativity shines in Microsoft's "Innovation Cup"

On December 13, 2021, the results of the 2022 20th Microsoft "Innovation Cup" Global Student Competition (hereinafter referred to as the "Innovation Cup") China Finals were officially announced. With the Silent Talk project, the Silver Talk team from Xi'an stood out from 22 finalists to win the Innovation Cup China championship and will represent China in the global online semifinals to be held from March to May next year.

With the theme of "Concentrating On Youth and Achieving Dreams", this year's "Innovation Cup" focuses on the four major innovation directions of the earth, education, health and lifestyle. A total of more than 1,700 students from more than 400 national colleges and universities from peking university, Tsinghua University, Nanjing University and other eight competition areas participated, and more than 400 works were received in the competition, and a total of 22 participating teams qualified for the championship in China.

In the end, Xi'an's Silent Talk team won the championship, and their Silent Talk– Speech Rehabilitation Training project is a platform for assisting in the treatment of speech disorders. This platform focuses on patients with speech disorders, and in view of the current shortage of resources for therapists in the speech correction industry, it combines hardware equipment with software algorithms to collect lip posture and audio signals during patients' practice. Through artificial intelligence algorithms such as local posture capture and audio segmentation of the collected information, combined with database comparison, to evaluate the patient's practice and give score and intelligent evaluation guidance, six major correction functions such as oral correction, semantic training, lip and tongue exercise, listening training, breathing training, and follow-up training have been realized. Through the team's self-created multi-modal audio and video fusion technology, the orthodontic efficiency can be greatly improved, and to a certain extent, the problem of orthodontic inefficiency caused by factors such as insufficient professional level of therapists or unguided exercises can be alleviated.

In addition to the champion project, many students combine digital technology with various needs such as daily life and agriculture to bring creative projects. Since their grandmother often forgot to take her medicine, SuperIOT team members brought a smart pill box project. The project is designed for today's elderly people and the families where the elderly are located, and its main functions are: intelligent management of the elderly taking medicines, detection of whether the elderly have fallen, emergency contact for rescue in critical situations, and prevention of the elderly from getting lost.

Three Zhuge Liang and a team of stink cobblers brought a white feather broiler health monitoring technology project based on sound detection and machine learning. The project designed a white-feathered broiler health monitoring technology based on sound detection and machine learning, which can realize the automatic monitoring and early warning of broiler health by collecting the sound signals of broilers with a fixed duration within the area, identifying the number of different types of sounds and the proportion of cough sounds. After a year-long test, the average recognition accuracy obtained was 94.16%.

Bao Jiafeng, President of Microsoft China, said: "As the world's largest and most influential student science and technology event, the Innovation Cup has ushered in its 20th birthday. Over the past year or so, the pandemic and its chain reaction have brought unprecedented changes to the world. In the face of this situation, the company actively cultivates digital technology innovation talents, hoping to promote social, economic and environmental sustainable development, and presents this original intention through the theme of the "Innovation Cup" for two consecutive years. It is reported that the excellent projects selected by the competition will receive support from Microsoft technology, platforms, resources and other aspects to help the project form a commercial solution that can be landed."

Image source: Microsoft