Chandigarh: Chitkara University announced that its professors teamed up project entitled ‘Paperless Erasable Magnetic Braille Slate’ was presented at UN Influx – a global hackathon at CIS Chandigarh from March 10-12, 2017 and is adjudged as the winner in first place. The final round of presentations were held at UN Headquarters, New York on 15-16 May 2017 and the project made it to the UN crowdfunding of world-changing ideas.
Chitkara University has a dedicated research concept, Chitkara University Research & Innovation Network (CURIN). CURIN helps in patent facilitation licensing and consultancy that provides a complete handholding to its students, staff and faculty members from ideation to patenting. The students and faculty members are actively involved in various research projects at national and international level.
UN Influx Global Hackathon 2017 aims to inspire the creation of world-changing startups around three of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. All 21 winning ideas will be placed on UN bespoke crowdfunding platform where the whole world will be able to view, find, discuss ideas, invest their time (mentorship) or money (donate/invest) and participate in the newborn ideas. Depending on the amount of sponsorship raised, all events will be followed up by a product demo day, six months later at the UN Headquarters in New York City.
Paperless Erasable Braille Slate Project is aimed at transforming society for better education. As per a report developed by UNESCO and survey done by the UN as an example, In India, percentage of kids with disabilities still out of school: UN. This is not only a serious issue in India but also acts as a challenging problem all over the world. To provide basic education in primary schools of physically-disabled children is a challenge when compared to the students of the mainstream society.
The team involved three inventors from Chitkara University namely, Dr. Amandeep Singh Oberoi, Dr. Virender Kadyan and Mr. Vinay Kukreja. A patent has been filed based upon the proposed project bearing Patent Filing No: 201611033447. The team applies continuous efforts to help needy people by utilizing their technical skill and education experience for improving the education system of blind children.
On this laurel, Dr. Madhu Chitkara, Vice Chancellor of Chitkara University said, “It is a great honor that Chitkara University is being recognized as a research and innovation centric organization by United Nations (UN) at an International level and positioning our professors’ idea for crowdfunding of world-changing ideas. To bring out innovations, Chitkara University has come up with the concept of CURIN, which paved the way for strategic, multi-disciplinary research. Within our extensive networks of centers of excellence, world-class innovation labs, access to global researchers, staff, and students across disciplines are able to extend the boundaries of knowledge to International level.”
Speaking on the milestone, Dr. Oberoi (key member of the project), Associate Professor at Chitkara University said, “Chitkara University allows its staff and students to embark on research with access to future-focussed engineering facilities, allowing creative design solutions to be developed almost seamlessly from imagination to concept and reality in a single journey. Our project is aimed at putting technology to its best use to impact the education transformation in the society. We thank Chitkara University and United Nations for being supportive from day one on this project. We have already been funded 12% with about a month remaining to achieve the total funding of £2,000.”
Elaborating on the project, Dr. Kadyan (key contributor to the project), Assistant Professor at Chitkara University said, “Our project target is to support these blind children and provide education to them. They have special schools and use special language (such as Braille) for their education. During the initial stage of learning Braille language, they adopt a Braille slate, thick paper, sharp stylus to make impressions on paper. With the advancement in technology, there has been manifold progress in all the sectors. Similarly, the invention of Traditional Braille Slate leads to a revolution for the people who are visually impaired.”
