BERLIN – Technology projects made in Ukraine or by Ukrainian entrepreneurs and researchers are making its way to European conferences. On Nov. 8, the Falling Walls Lab conference in Berlin saw three presenters coming from Ivano-Frankivsk, Kyiv and Kryvyi Rig.
The Falling Walls Lab event is a one-day non-stop presentation where young innovators, who went through selection process in their own countries, step into the spotlight for three minutes to show what they’re up to. There is no special topic to the event, which allowed a wide variety of disciplines to be represented, from agriculture to medicine and from international diplomacy to nanochemistry.
The project presented by Ukrainian researchers are aimed to solve quite different humanity problems as well, including sleep quality, voice communication for mute people and finding new, sustainable sources of meat.
Smart Pillow
Oleksandr Shymanko, an 18-year-old international relations student and entrepreneur based in Ivano-Frankivsk, showed the audience his PiPillow. The product won the Audience Award at the Falling Walls Lab 2015.
Developed by a team of 10 in Ukraine and the US, PiPillow is an actual pillow that can track your sleep, play a lullaby and wake you up at the best time possible.
“PiPillow can be connected to a smartphone to play music, and the music will stop automatically when you fall asleep. It solves the problem of sleeping in headphones, which is quite uncomfortable,” Shymanko told the Kyiv Post. “Inside the pillow, there’s a microphone, accelerometer and gyroscope to measure your sleep.”
Shymanko describes his own role in the startup as “the concept architect, recruiter, designer, PR manager, and sometimes an engineer.” He won the Falling Walls Lab selection event in Kyiv, which was organised by the Klitschko Foundation in September.
At the moment, there’s one working prototype of PiPillow, which Shymanko demonstrated in Berlin. In the following months, he plans to start an online crowdfunding campaign and start shipments in the spring 2016. The planned market price of PiPillow is about $70.
Oksana Borysenko presents the EnableTalk gloves on stage at Falling Walls Lab 2015. (Andrii Degeler).
EnableTalk
Another Ukrainian product presented at the Falling Walls Lab in Berlin might be familiar to you: the EnableTalk smart gloves were widely covered in the press in 2012 when the project won the Imagine Cup contest. Augmented by various sensors, the innovative gloves can recognize the wearer’s gestures and “translate” them from the sign language.
Oksana Borysenko, CEO of EnableTalk, was the runner up at Falling Walls Lab in Kyiv and received her ticket to Berlin from Ukrainian Technology & Innovation Export Alliance (UTIEA), an organization made up of Ukrainian IT outsourcing firms Ciklum, EPAM, GlobalLogic, Luxoft, Miratech and SoftServe.
Although the project has been around for more than three years, there’s still much to be done. The initial team of the startup was based in Donetsk, and when the war erupted, its members moved to different places, which resulted in the project being put on hold for about a year. Currently the team is distributed between Kyiv, Lviv, San Francisco, Nizhniy Novgorod and London.
The current version of the gloves is much smaller than it was in 2012, with the sensors barely noticeable to an onlooker. It doesn’t have any recognizing capabilities itself but connects to the computer by Bluetooth. On the software side, there’s the application based on neural networks that can learn continuously and become better in recognizing the wearer’s signs over time.
The gloves now work with the English and Russian sign languages but its software can “learn” other languages.
“We’ve received a very positive feedback from the hearing impaired community in the US,” Borysenko told the Kyiv Post. “We’re also thinking about making spin-offs of the product for sports, smart environments control, and so on.”
The project is currently looking for external funding to overhaul the software part and set up mass production of the gadget, the estimated market price of which is $300. Borysenko is also considering applying for the Highway1 acceleration program in the U.S. in the following months.
Sergiy Smetana talks about alternative meat sources on stage at Falling Walls Lab. (Andrii Degeler)
2015
New sources of meat
The third Ukrainian presenter at the Falling Walls Lab didn’t actually come to Berlin from Ukraine. Three years ago, Sergiy Smetana moved from Kryvyi Rig to the German city of Vechta to pursue a Ph.D. degree.
On the Falling Walls Lab Smetana talked about two food technology projects he’s participating in. Both projects are about finding alternative sources of meat that are more sustainable and eco-friendly than farm animals.
“On one hand, we want to lower the amount of mass produced meat, improve the quality of meat and use various protein sources available. Although plant proteins are widely used on the market, there are also alternative sources of animal proteins like insects and microalgae,” Smetana told the Kyiv Post. “With those, you could grow your meat on your kitchen.”
Smetana’s role in both projects is to work on sustainability of technologies and products life cycle, i.e. make sure that the “new meat” is better than the “old meat” in terms of its environmental footprint.
Freelance writer
Andrii Degeler can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT
coverage is sponsored by Looksery, Ciklum, Steltec Capital and SoftServe. The content is
independent of the donors.
