Two groups of PUC-MG students have developed accessibility technologies and have a chance to represent Brazil in the Imagine Cup grand final, in May
São Paulo, March 16, 2023. Two Brazilian teams, made up of students from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, are among the finalists in the regional stage of the Imagine Cup, global competition promoted by Microsoft that will reward the most innovative technology proposals, developed by students to solve problems related to four themes: Environment, Health, Education and Lifestyle. The projects, Deaf Glass, glasses that transform sounds into subtitles for deaf people, and Blind-E, a translator of digital texts for the Braille language system, compete in the health and education categories, respectively, and will compete with other teams in the Americas from countries like USA, Canada and Ecuador. The regional edition takes place this March, when the grand finalists who will participate in the world championship scheduled to take place in May will also be announced.
Imagine Cup is a global competition promoted for 21 years with the objective of stimulating entrepreneurship, technology learning and cooperation. under theme “Every student for being an entrepreneur”, the dispute happens in three rounds, online and face-to-face, depending on the region, and the finalists in each category were selected in the online semifinal, in January.
A final regional is divided into three groups: Americas, where, in addition to Brazilians, teams from the USA, Canada, Ecuador are also competing; Asia and EMEA – Europe, Middle East and Africa. Deaf Glass competes in the health category, while Blind-E is in the running for best education project. In addition to the cash prize, winners will be supported by Microsoft Startups mentors and will have the opportunity to participate in the Founders Hub.
“We are very proud of the performance of the Brazilian teams this year. We believe that these are projects with great potential, as they are solutions focused on accessibility and inclusion, which use technology as a tool to support issues that are relevant to society”, says Christiano Faig, Vice President of Technology and Solutions at Microsoft Brazil .
Conceived by students Matheus Rosa Campbell, Maicon Gomes Messias and João Pedro Moura de Assis Filho, the Deaf Glass is a pair of glasses capable of transforming ambient sounds into subtitles for people with hearing impairments. This solution uses Microsoft’s Azure Voice Recognition API, which, through a microphone, captures ambient sound and transcribes it into subtitles on the OLED Display adapted to the lens of the glasses.
already the Blind-E, a project by Gabriel Nagem Volpini, Frederico Prado Marques and Gabriel Costa Pinto, is a translator of digital texts for the Braille standard, which enables language teaching and offers accessibility for the visually impaired. This project uses Microsoft Azure’s Translator and Cognitive Services (AI), connected to hardware that translates the content into the Braille language system. The purpose of the equipment is to reduce the cost of books and information in physical formats and make digital content accessible more quickly for the visually impaired who use this language system.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation in the era of the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. The company has been in Brazil for 34 years and is one of the subsidiaries of Microsoft Corporation, founded in 1975, which is present in over 190 countries. From July 2021 to June 2022, the company invested more than US$ 15 million in donations and discounts for non-profit entities, impacting more than 2,000 institutions with software donations, discounts for purchases and support for training projects. With the launch of the Microsoft For Startups Founders Hub, 443 new startups were approved, totaling 703 supported startups, which together have consumed USD 11,898,488.00 of Azure cloud credits.