Microsoft has revealed the winning team for its 2017 Imagine Cup competition, bestowing first-place bragging rights to a Czech team called X.GLU. The student team's project was a hardware meter meant to help children with diabetes better cope with their disease.
Developed by a trio of students from Czech Technical University in Prague, X.Glu's project is a closed system for measuring blood glucose made up of an "innovative blood glucose meter prototype, cloud-based application, and smartphone application." The meter itself resembles a credit card, eschewing the typically bulky nature of glucose meters currently on the market. It doesn't use any buttons or a display, and it can be controlled directly from a smartphone. The team says its platform can be used for the entire population, but it chose to initially focus its efforts on helping Type 1 diabetic children.
As winners, X.GLU will receive a $100,000 cash prize, a $125,000 Azure Grant, a trip to Build 2018, and a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
The other finalist teams, making up second through fourth place, also featured some pretty innovative projects. From Microsoft:
Second place went to Team Oculogx of the United States, which built a mixed reality app that uses HoloLens and Microsoft Azure to improve the process and experience for locating items in large warehouses. Third place went to Team Nash of Argentina for its project, RESCUE, a Microsoft Azure-powered platform that uses drones to reduce response times during natural disasters. Finally, fourth place went to Team NeuroGate of Canada, which created a solution that uses Microsoft Kinect motion data and machine learning to analyze gait patterns and diagnose potential neurodegenerative diseases.
This was the fifteenth year of Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition, and it drew entries from thousands of students around the world. Eventually, that was whittled down to a group of 54 teams from 39 countries that were invited to compete in the World Finals.
