Champions - TechBlazer Awards 2021
The Techblazer Awards is the nation’s highest accolade for tech innovation and aims to provide recognition and endorsement to Singapore-based organisations that have exemplified the spirit of innovation in their development of tech products and services, or their use of tech to achieve excellence. The Awards also aim to spur greater innovation from the winning companies and propel them to greater heights in the region and internationally, with the hopes that these companies will also blaze the trail for others. Techblazer Awards 2021 had over 450 entries from all across Singapore.
Aishik and Ritik created DementiCare, a mobile application to complement caregiving for Dementia patients. Having won Global competitions like Google Solutions Challenge and talked to organisations for adoption of the application, they were advised by Dr. Wesley Tan Chee Wah and Dr Sourav Sengupta, their mentors, to apply to Techblazer Awards to gain credibility and backing of SGTech. They prepared a complete product proposal, application demo and write ups for their questions in the initial round.
Following this, they were selected for the semi-final round of the competition. This included a 10 minute pitch to the judges, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A session. The judges were all extremely knowledgeable and had experience in different industries, ranging from IT to product Development to Business Administration and Finance. The session was extremely productive, and provided insight about developing a well rounded solution keeping in mind the business as well as the technological aspects in mind. They were able to keep these learnings in mind to prepare for the final round of judging.
After about a month, they were ecstatic to learn that DementiCare had been shortlisted for the final judging round of the competition. Given the low shortlisting rate of 30% of the submissions that had made it to the semi-finals, making it to the finals itself was a very big achievement.
The final round of judging had a very similar format to the semi-finals, but with a longer Q&A session lasting around 15 minutes. The increased weightage for the Q&A session meant that the judges thoroughly evaluated the innovation - from the use of technology to address specific pain points to the commercial viability of the solution. The judging panel for the final round comprised of accomplished individuals from some of the most impactful institutions, including the likes of Chairman and CEO of SGTech, CTO of GIC, the Vice President of Meta, Managing Directors of AWS and Microsoft (Singapore) and the Managing Director (Big Data / AI, Consumer Banking) of DBS Bank etc. Their years of experience in leadership position meant that they had an eye for choosing the best of the best solutions.
After about 2 months, the award ceremony was scheduled for the 24th of January, 2022. Ritik and Aishik were represented by Dr Wesley Tan Chee Wah in the award ceremony. Mrs. Josephine Teo, Minister of Communications and Information was the Chief Guest of this grand ceremony. After an initial round of speeches by the CEO of SGTech and Mrs. Josephine Teo, it was time for the results, specifically for the Student Techblazer category. Our joy knew no bounds when DementiCare was awarded the Gold Prize (First Position) for Techblazer Awards 2021. Seeing NTU's logo under the Gold Prize section, having a trophy dedicated to the university and ourselves and seeing one of our mentors on stage receive the award from Mrs. Josephine Teo was a great moment of pride for both Ritik and Aishik. We were elated that we could represent NTU in this grand ceremony and further establish its status as a hub of tech innovation.
They hope that their success in this platform can motivate fellow students that they too can achieve similar feats and help further Singapore's dream to strengthen its position as a global hub of tech innovation.