Three young women engineers have been recognised by Bosch for their visions of how the Internet of Things (IoT) might transform the way we live our lives.
Bosch’s #BetweenUsWeCan campaign sought to find the best Internet of Things (IoT) innovations, while simultaneously supporting efforts to improve gender diversity within engineering.
Maz Chowdhury, Sophie Spooner and Ka Man Wong were chosen as the winners, with thier ideas ranging from a a sensor-based water irrigation system that could ensure the perfect lawn; smart glass with micro-cameras that could record unauthorised entry into a vehicle; and a computerised recycling container that could incentivise consumers to recycle waste materials.
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The three winners, all of whom are engineering students, will now get the chance to pay a two-day visit to Bosch’s advanced Renningen and Reutlingen R&D facilities near Stuttgart, in Germany where Bosch is developing forward-looking Internet of Things technologies.
The winners will also receive a year’s mentoring from Bosch engineers.
President of Bosch in the UK Steffen Hoffmann commented: “At a time of chronic skill shortages within engineering, the competition provided a platform for women to demonstrate the ambition to solve problems and ideas to change the world.
“We challenged the brightest young female engineers to think about how the IoT might transform our lives, and they certainly delivered. The three winners showed that they have imagination and creativity. Each of them had also given thought as to how their ideas might work in practice.”
Maz Chowdhury, a chemical engineering student from the University of Surrey, devised a garden watering and irrigation system that was linked to ground-based sensors to ensure that lawns and plants would receive exactly the right amount of water they needed.
Sophie Spooner, studying communications engineering at Aston University in Birmingham, imagined the use of front and rear window-mounted micro-cameras that could record video footage in the wake of unauthorised entry into a vehicle. The security system could send the images to the car owner’s smartphone.
Meanwhile, Ka Man Wong, an engineering student at the University of Bath, envisaged a multi-sensory recycling container that could classify the type of waste that consumers were recycling, employing a points-based incentivisation scheme to reward them accordingly.
