Team Humane emerges winner in Microsoft Nigeria’s Imagine Cup 2016 National Finals

On Friday, March 15th, at the National Finals of the 2016 edition of Microsoft Nigeria Imagine Cup, Team Humane representing the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife emerged winners of this year’s competition.

Now in its ninth year in Nigeria, Microsoft Imagine Cup is the premier student technology program and competition, and a cornerstone of the Microsoft YouthSpark initiative. It provides an opportunity for student technologists, developers and aspiring entrepreneurs from all academic backgrounds to collaborate, develop a technology application, create a business plan and gain a keen understanding of what is needed to bring a concept to market.

This year National finals was held at the Microsoft Office in Victoria Island, Lagos, and had eleven participating teams drawn from various tertiary institution within the country. The winning team, Team Humane, which comprised of Otaru Babatunde, Oyatope Blessing, Shoaga Victor, and Ayodele Obasegun, competed in the World Citizenship Category.

Their solution, Humane is a solution for the visually impaired, which enables them to interact and navigate freely on their mobile phones. The solution comes with an accompanying hardware known as the Humane handle, which interacts with apps installed on a device using Bluetooth. A visually impaired person would be able to navigate through various apps installed on his/her mobile phone using the handle and an integrated voice navigation system.

According to the team lead, Ayodele Obasegun we were concerned about solving a major challenge leveraging technology hence, we embark on this project. He explained, “We have been developing solutions for various organizations, and we felt a need to impact our community and the world as a whole, hereafter this solution for the visually impaired. It was initially targeted at gaming for the visually impaired, but later we felt we can do more than gaming.” 

Commenting on the team’s winning, Obasegun said, “We are very happy. As part of our dedication on this solution we have been on a booth camp for weeks to ensure there would be no errors on this project, so it is quite exciting that we eventually emerged winner. We had earlier participated in the competition two years back (2014), we took the reviews and feedback from the previous competition and I must say it paid off. We took these feedbacks and refined our solutions to what it is now, we are so happy we won, also we appreciate the feedbacks we got from friends, developers’ community and from our Head of Department at school.”