Four major areas of innovative technology projects compete in this year's Imagine Cup. Among them there are projects dealing with climate change, agriculture and green technologies, solutions focusing on innovations in teaching, health care and life support for the disabled and projects in the "lifestyle" category dealing with recreation, community building and shaping passions.
Poland is represented by the Intelligent Hives team, selected in the online semifinals, consisting of doctoral students and undergraduates from the Faculty of Electrical, Electronic, Computer and Control Engineering at Lodz University of Technology. Their project on intelligent monitoring of hives is one of the six projects in the Earth category.
- In recent years we can observe a decline in the honeybee population, which shows that preventing bee extinction is not easy. Pollination by bees ensures reproduction and growth of many plant species, therefore the lack of these beneficial insects will affect not only beekeepers, but all of us, says Sebastian Górecki, the initiator of the project. - In order to meet this problem, the Intelligent Hives solution has been created.
Intelligent Hives supports beekeepers in managing their apiary and provides an easy to use system for monitoring their hives. The BeeHUB device, developed by a Polish team, takes precise measurements of weight, sound, temperature and humidity, among other things. It allows the user to check whether the hive is well insulated, whether there is no moisture accumulation that could cause the frames to rot. The Intelligent Hives application allows beekeepers to monitor their apiaries from any place and at any time using mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and computers. In addition, the app makes it easy to detect diseases, swarming, conduct hive inspections, schedule tasks, and keep records of bee colony diseases.
The Intelligent Hives team succeeded in reaching the world finals of the competition, but they are not going to stop there and will try to make it to the final four. Let's keep our fingers crossed!