While it is essential for fashion brands to reuse and recycle clothes, their efforts will not significantly reduce their carbon footprint in the long run because the rate of clothing production and consumption is only going to accelerate. Sustainable fashion ultimately means less fashion, which contradicts fashion’s current linear “take, make, and waste” model. This project helps fashion brands achieve on-demand production by supplying color-changing fibers to be spun into garments, minimizing the risk of overproduction. At the retail store, shoppers will be the ones to customize the color of their garments at the color-changing stations. Viberent’s technology has the potential to redefine the 3 R’s: Reduce textile and dye waste, Reuse clothes in a completely new way, and use Recycled material to create color-changing fibers. Let’s close the loop and transform linear fashion into circular fashion.
Awards: Prize Winner
Wise Earthcare
Over 1.2 billion plastic toothbrushes are thrown away in the United States every year–enough to fill up 1,100 shipping containers. The problem is that 99% of those toothbrushes are made from plastic that is non-recyclable and they end up in landfills or the ocean, contributing to the increase of pollution. The solution is a toothbrush that is 100% biodegradable, clinically validated by the American Dental Association, which is delivered directly to the consumer via subscription, retail, and dental offices. These products will be both clinically effective and sustainable and will include an array of oral care products, including toothbrushes for adults and kids, electric toothbrush replacement heads, floss, floss picks, toothpaste, and mouthwash. With validation from the ADA and both dentists and consumers regarding the design, this product can ensure that patients/users are receiving the best possible oral healthcare products, while still playing a positive role in the sustainability movement.
Walls to Bridges
Walls to Bridges is a pilot program in partnership with the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz (CRC) designed to address communication issues between incarcerated parents and their adult-age children in Santa Cruz. Using restorative justice practices and principles, the program will facilitate confidential dialogues regarding the impact of incarceration on relationships and planning for communication resolutions, such as letters, phone calls, and visits. The dialogues will take place between incarcerated parents and their adult-age children within a Santa Cruz County jail. The process focuses on the procedural aspect of healing, like what steps need to be taken to address the harm and reduce the adverse outcomes for families impacted by incarceration. A research aspect will inform for potential expansion with the CRC as well as replication for other restorative justice or criminal justice reform organizations. Walls To Bridges has the potential to inform the public of familial incarceration challenges and help make policy recommendations.
Theater to Heighten Community Voices: Dharavi Slum
Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India, which boasts a unique economy and culture, is currently threatened with destruction due to the government’s plan for redevelopment. This project seeks to use theater as a means of uplifting community voices to preserve the neighborhood. Through a series of workshops, young participants will develop creative means of telling their personal stories about the positive aspects of their community, as well as the challenges they face. This will culminate in the creation of an original show, which will be performed for both slum residents and the greater Mumbai area, celebrating community voices and combating negative perceptions about the slum. The project also serves as a means of qualitative data collection in a severely under-researched area. This project seeks to promote a humanizing perspective of a particularly marginalized group of people with the hopes that the government and wider Mumbai society will learn about the wealth of culture Dharavi holds.
The Mobius Project
These days, tech companies constantly have to admit that they are not fully equipped to deal with all of the ways bad actors can use their platforms or technologies to cause harm – and the ways their product can disproportionately harm particular groups of people. The Mobius Project is a knowledge and research platform that provides practical ways to incorporate abusability testing into existing product life cycles and teams, drawing from existing expertise from privacy, security, scholars, and digital activists. This platform will gather a community of people interested in combating platform abuse, tools and frameworks that product teams can integrate into their software development project life cycle, and a searchable database of platform abuses to make it easier to identify product risks.
Suppression of Evaporation and Percolation Water Losses with Novel Infiltration Insert Method to Improve Plant Yield Utilizing Carbon Sequestration
Increasing global population requires 70% more food production by 2050, predominantly cultivated in developing countries and areas with an arid climate. Irrigation consumes more than 80% of the world’s fresh water. Traditional irrigation practices suffer from evaporation and percolation loss of freshwater and existing efficient technologies are very expensive and not economically viable for developing world. The purpose of this innovation is to develop and implement an economically viable technique and devices to reduce irrigation water loss and apply them to micro-irrigation to help small farm owners in the developing world. The proposed infiltration system inserts under drip emitters mimic SDI and delivers water to the root zone. Then engineered perlite/peat-moss topsoil beds suppresses evaporation loss by locking water in the pores and a percolation control layer at the root zone uses charcoal amendment to retain water and improve root health/plant yield, ultimately working to reduce the water footprint of agriculture in arid regions.
Signum
Unemployment and underemployment affect roughly 70% of all Americans in the deaf community. Signum is a video chat solution created to solve this problem. Designed as a workforce development tool, Signum utilizes a machine learning model to translate video of ASL gestures to text, easing communication for people with hearing and speech impairments who can only communicate in ASL. Although several other startups are currently developing similar technologies, Signum distinguishes a gap in the market due to its emphasis on providing an inexpensive and non-intrusive means of communication targeted towards removing barriers in the workplace. Signum’s current target market is “functionally deaf” ASL users in the workforce between 18 and 35-years old. Signum will be used in conjunction with popular workforce video chat platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Cisco WebEx to expand to a broader audience and impact millions of lives.
PIC.ME
Approximately one third of people with autism are nonverbal, resulting in a rising need for a user-friendly, socio-culturally relevant means of assistive technology to help them communicate. PIC.ME: Personalized Interactive Communication Made for Everyone is an app that can be downloaded onto a personal smart device, such as a smartphone or tablet, for people with exceptional needs, such as autism, or other language disabilities. Users can personalize pictures used for picture exchange communication that are culturally and socially relevant to their lives, record vocalizations for words and sounds to match pictures, and practice language and social skills with games. This app will not be limited to people with autism, but will be accessible for any person living with a disability that causes a loss of the ability to effectively communicate. PIC.ME will not only make assistive technology more available to all, but it will make the right of communication more equitable for all.
NeoMotion AI
Stroke rehabilitation is often inaccessible, expensive, and requires a lot of scarce, highly trained professionals. By harnessing the processing power of smartphones in combination with recent advances in artificial intelligence, NeoMotion AI will be able to improve rehabilitation at a worldwide scale. NeoMotion AI is run on AI-based pose estimation algorithms and it optimizes them for usage on smartphones without internet connection. Using a smartphone camera and this software, the solution involves tracking the coordinates of every joint of the upper and lower limbs, proving patients, rehabilitation specialists, and physicians with a tool to track patient’s rehabilitation progress over time. At a later stage, performing rehabilitation exercises in front of a smartphone would allow patients to receive personalized exercise corrections or new and adaptive exercises suggestions. NeoMotion AI can provide an engaging rehabilitation experience for stroke patients through a social platform, creating a sense of community, and a more integrated management system for physical therapists or physicians.