This years’ Dyson Awards has been awarded to a urine test for breast cancer and a material, made from waste crops, that can convert UV light into renewable energy.
The International Dyson Award was awarded to ‘The Blue Box’; and the new Dyson Sustainability Award to AuREUS.
Both winners grab £30,000; with the International winner also awarded £5,000 to their University.
The International Award
‘The Blue Box’ was created Judit Giro Benet after her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
The ingenious device relies on a machine-learning algorithm to detect specific urine metabolites in the sample. The tech itself inspired by dogs that are capable of sniffing out cancer with incredible accuracy.
The device works when a user profile on ‘The Blue App’; places their urine sample it inside the device. The device takes around 30 seconds for six chemical sensors to start reacting to breast-cancer biomarkers and that data is then processed on a cloud server with a diagnosis is returned via the app.
The use of the cloud server means that the app can make use of an otherwise computationally expensive AI algorithm to process the results.
Dyson Award for for sustainability
2020 is the first year for the Dyson sustainability award.
The inaugural award was given to Carvey Ehren Maigue for AuREUS.
AuREUS – inspired in part by auroras; which not only look beautiful by absorbing high-energy gamma and UV rays and remitting them as low-energy visible light – is a material which converts UV light into renewable energy.
The new material works by using similar types of luminescent particles – which are cleverly derived from waste crops – suspended in a resin.
The idea is that the material can be applied to the outside of buildings – creating a new generation of “vertical solar farms” to harness solar energy.
