A team of four INESC-MN researchers – Pedro Ribeiro, Miguel Neto, Ana Rita Soares and Rafael Santos – have won the 1st prize ($2000 cash prize) at the 2019 edition of the IEEE International Contest of Sensors and Measurement Systems. The team is composed of Técnico students (Engineering Physics doctoral programme and Leaders for Technical Industries doctoral programme), under the guidance of Susana Cardoso de Freitas, professor at the Department of Physics and principal investigator at INESC-MN spintronics group.

This contest is jointly promoted and organised by IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society (IMS) and IEEE Sensors Council (SC) and is sponsored by STMicroelectronics, which provided each team with a SensorTile® kit. In this competition, master and PhD student teams from Universities and Institutions around the world are expected to propose a project and build a prototype where the SensorTile functionalities and small form factor are used to their fullest potential.

In the final phase, the INESC-MN team competed directly with teams from ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Rowan University (United States of America) and University of Kitakyushu (Japan). The contest demonstration session took place on March 12th, during the 2019 IEEE Sensors and Applications Symposium, in the University of Côte D’Azur, Nice, France.

The Técnico team won the 1st prize for their project – SpineCop – a wearable and compact posture measurement and correction system, monitoring in real-time the back angle and curvature and providing the user with information of the quality of their posture during the day.

According to Pedro Ribeiro, “SpineCop is cheaper, more compact and therefore more comfortable to use” than the other similar devices. “We think that this prototype has potential so we may continue to work on it in our free time, but that’s something that we are still considering”. “SpineCop is available at INESC so that other students may continue to improve it and use it”, says the researcher.