A nurse, a firefighter and three developers, Spanish to say the least, are the winners of a competition that some have defined as the ‘unofficial’ Nobel for innovation. This is the international Call for Code challenge, an initiative led by IBM and which rewards technological solutions invented to mitigate natural disasters .
Call for Code asks developers to create practical, effective and high-quality applications based on web services, mobile, data, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) or weather that have an immediate and lasting impact for the humanity.
The 2019 Challenge introduced a special emphasis on individual health and community well-being, which involved developing solutions that could reduce the risk of disease, improve access to data and the availability of resources, and address health needs. mental health of those affected before, during and after disasters.
And all these characteristics were fulfilled by the award-winning team, a system that uses Internet of Things technology and artificial intelligence to monitor the safety of firefighters as they fight the flames. The winning project, Prometheus, developed by a team from Barcelona, has been announced by the companies promoting this competition, IBM and David Clark Cause, at a gala that took place at the United Nations headquarters in New York last week.
The Prometheus team, made up of firefighter Joan Herrera, emergency nurse Vicenç Padró, and three developers and data scientists, Salomé Valero, Josep Ràfols and Marco Rodríguez, have created a hardware and software solution based on multiple IBM Cloud services. The device, about the size of a smartphone so it can be worn on the firefighter’s arm, has multiple sensors that measure key variables such as temperature, humidity and smoke concentration.
This information is collected and transmitted to the Cloud platform. A RED-Node workflow sends the data to an artificial intelligence-based machine learning model from IBM Watson, which distills the information into a simple color code that is received at firefighter control centers where they can monitor the fire. health status of your firefighters in real time.
This year the Call for Code challenge has had the participation of some 180,000 people from 165 countries, who have used data from The Weather Company and open source technologies, including IBM Cloud, IBM Watson and IBM Blockchain to create more than 5,000 applications that They sought to mitigate the impact of natural disasters.
