Gaming-inspired Parkinson’s keyboard wins 2025 James Dyson Award

A therapeutic keyboard for folks with Parkinson’s and an AI-powered water high quality sensor have gained this 12 months’s James Dyson Award, recognising the perfect innovations by college students and graduates from the world over.

Out of greater than 2,100 entries from 28 international locations, engineer Filip Budny’s floating WaterSense buoy was chosen as the worldwide sustainability winner, whereas the OnCue keypad by product designer Alessandra Galli took house gold within the medical class.

Each will obtain a prize of £30,000 to assist develop their prototype right into a sellable, scalable product that may be dropped at market.

This 12 months marks the primary time that each successful tasks combine synthetic intelligence (AI) in a roundabout way to analyse knowledge and supply predictions.

The OnCue keyboard makes use of AI as one in every of a sequence of therapeutic cues to assist folks with Parkinson’s sort extra simply and precisely by managing the tremors and freezing that include the neurological situation.

Vibrations transmitted by the keys and matching wristbands assist to information the consumer’s typing rhythm, whereas the AI features very similar to predictive textual content, anticipating and illuminating the letter they’re probably to press subsequent.

Galli, who’s a graduate of the Delft University of Technology within the Netherlands, took cues from gaming keyboards to create a compact, cut up design that reduces pressure on the arms and arms, with raised edges on the keycaps offering higher buy.

Sliders permit customers to customize the haptic and visible cues to go well with their particular signs, which might range from individual to individual and everyday.

Galli hopes to make use of the prize cash to get the keyboard into the arms of individuals with Parkinson’s and develop its use to help different neurological situations, together with Alzheimer’s and dystonia.

“It’s a clever and empowering solution, allowing people with Parkinson’s and other motor conditions to stay connected and communicate independently,” praised British inventor James Dyson, who launched the award in 2005.

In WaterSense, AI is used as a substitute to supply real-time monitoring of the water high quality in our rivers and lakes – and forecast air pollution occasions as much as 72 hours prematurely.

The gadget makes use of low-cost recyclable paper sensors to measure greater than 20 key indicators of water high quality, that are routinely changed every day, very similar to a roll of movie in a digital camera.

The knowledge gleaned on this course of is transmitted to an AI-powered on-line platform at common intervals, for instance each minute or each hour.

All of this data is made publicly out there by a web site and used to foretell future air pollution occasions, empowering native communities and authorities to take motion to guard their waterways.

Budny, a PhD candidate in nanotechnology at Poland’s Warsaw University of Technology, designed the system to be powered by pure water currents by a built-in hydrogenerator.

And the roll of paper sensors must be changed solely every year, permitting for steady monitoring. This is essential as a result of these landlocked our bodies of water are particularly weak to air pollution however a lot much less intently watched than our seas.

“Existing water quality monitoring systems are slow, manual and sporadic,” Dyson stated. “Filip, our sustainability winner, has invented WaterSense to measure water quality in real time and smartly predict pollution before it happens.”

Budny is already testing WaterSense in 20 areas throughout Poland in partnership with water corporations and native governments. Now, the intention is to make use of his prize cash to scale the system right into a “continent-wide network” by 2026.

Now in its twentieth 12 months, the James Dyson Award has supported greater than 400 younger inventors and awarded over one million kilos in prize cash. Previous recipients embody an anti-hair loss helmet for chemo sufferers, photo voltaic panels made out of meals waste and a hands-free IV for catastrophe zones.