EEE student part of the winning team in Singapore's Techblazer Awards 2021

EEE Year 4 student Aishik Nagar, together with his teammate Ritik Bhatia, a Year 4 from SCSE have won Singapore’s TechBlazers award. TechBlazers is the nation’s highest accolade for tech innovation and aims to provide recognition and endorsement to Singapore-based organisations that have exemplified the spirit of innovation in their development of tech products and services, or their use of tech to achieve excellence. The Awards also aim to spur greater innovation from the winning companies and propel them to greater heights in the region and internationally, with the hopes that these companies will also blaze the trail for others. TechBlazer Awards 2021 had over 450 entries from all across Singapore. It is jointly organized by SGTech and Infocomm Media Development Authority Singapore.

 The students felt that TechBlazer awards are the perfect platform for budding tech products and startups to gain feedback, recognition, and branding from Singapore’s top organizations. Having developed a product and gained market feedback on it, TechBlazer would be the competition to not only boost their product’s standing but also learn new ways to apply technological innovations in their product.

Their proposal idea was a mobile application called DementiCare - a one-stop solution to Dementia caregiving that leveraged the power of technology to provide a 2-way interface for communication between dementia caregivers and their patients. Having personal relations suffering from dementia, they had first-hand experience of the issues associated with Dementia caregiving. Further, given the rapidly aging population of the world and the rapid increase in the number of dementia patients worldwide, they were shocked to see that there were no existing solutions to dementia caregiving and hence we decided to leverage the power of technology to address this issue. With a feature-rich caregiver interface that had several productivity features like chatbots, discussion forums, and real-time patient information dashboards, and a simplistic interface for the patients that did a plethora of heavy tasks in the background like live location tracking, crash detection to trigger calls to SOS contacts.

The competition was very comprehensive, consisting of 3 rounds and requiring not only technological innovation but also business acumen. The first rounds required a complete product proposal, followed by 2 rounds of interviews with a distinguished judging panel including the likes of Chairman and CEO of SGTech, CTO of GIC, the Vice President of Meta, Managing Directors of AWS and Microsoft (Singapore), and the Managing Director (Big Data / AI, Consumer Banking) of DBS Bank. Their years of experience in leadership positions meant that they had an eye for choosing the best of the best solutions. They had to work hard to develop a compelling application from scratch, prepare the best pitch, focus and analyze their product from a business standpoint and form concrete strategies based on the Total Addressable Market to provide a compelling case for DementiCare. This was a huge learning experience for them and helped them gain valuable insights on developing and rolling out products to the market.

They were thrilled to learn that they had secured the Gold Prize (First Position) in the TechBlazer Awards 2021 - Singapore's most prestigious tech award. Their pride knew no bounds when they saw NTU's logo on the screen under the Gold Prize Awardees. Singapore's Minister for Communications and Information, Ms. Josephine Teo facilitated our team (represented by Dr. Wesley Tan Chee Wah from EEE) and they were glad that they could add another accolade to NTU's recognition in tech innovation. Both the team members were given certificates of excellence and a trophy. They will also be given $3000 in cash for winning the competition as well as numerous other benefits such as exclusive invitations for conferences, competitions as well as internship opportunities with SGTech.