FORD COLLEGE COMMUNITY CHALLENGE

Two Chair teams awarded prizes

Two teams of students and professors from the ACCIONA.ORG – ETSIT (UPM) Chair have been awarded prizes in the Ford College Community Challenge. This competition, now in its fourth year, aims to encourage university students to develop creative community building projects that respond to local needs. The winning proposals from ETSIT focus on the fight against energy poverty and the provision of rural health services. A third prize went to the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) for a project to encourage student social volunteering. Ford will subsidise each of the three initiatives with 5,000 euros to support their implementation.

ETSIT students Ana Isabel Sánchez García, Clara Martínez Pérez and Jorge Rubio Caldas (all three from the Bachelor’s Degree in Telecommunications Technologies and Services Engineering) and Isabel Salmerón Marazuela (from the Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering), coordinated by professors Laura del Río and Santiago Iglesias, are responsible for eNETgy. This project aims to combat energy poverty by developing hardware solutions that put the consumer at the centre. To this end, they are working on a prototype that will allow real-time collection of self-consumption from photovoltaic solar panels.

The other winning project from ETSIT is called RuralMed. It is made up of students Beatriz Arroyo Juárez (Degree in Biomedical Engineering), Aída Rodríguez Pérez (Degree in Telecommunications) and Ignacio Elvira Cruz (Master’s Degree in Telecommunications), under the coordination of professors Carlos Cuenca and Emiliano Acquila. The aim of their project is to enable rural inhabitants to make visits and/or calls to their family doctor or specialist via digital devices. The team is developing a tool to transfer the data collected by medical devices to the health personnel’s information system without the need for human intervention.