A team of Curtin software engineering students from the Department of Computing have been acknowledged for their innovation by winning the Student Project Category at the Western Australia Information Technology and Telecommunications Awards recently.
The group’s ground breaking “SENSii” technology aims to improve the quality of life for people living in aged care facilities and ultimately, save lives.
Team leader Matt Middleton-White said it hadn’t yet sunk in that team had won the award. ‘We weren’t sure what to expect going into the awards, we certainly weren’t expecting to come out the winners.’ ‘That said, Mark McDonald, Barry Dwiptura and I put a lot of time and effort into the project, and had a lot of support from both Curtin and our industry partner Netlink Group. So it is great to get some recognition for the team and everybody who helped us along the way.’
Mr Middleton-White said the group developed SENSii to address increasing demand on aged care facilities due to the growing elderly population.
‘SENSii provides assisted digital living for residential aged care providers allowing them to monitor a greater number of residents, increasing staff efficiency while decreasing response time to emergencies,’ he said.
‘And faster response times lead to less injuries, trauma and hospitalisations which can save lives.’
Mr Middleton-White said he believed the technology filled a gap in the market and addressed problems that existed with current applications.
‘The current collection of similar technologies is hard to use for non-computer adept individuals and they don’t interface with other systems, but SENSii solves these issues and provides additional capabilities,’ he said.
After successfully testing the product, the team is currently working to further develop the system as new features and needs are identified, with SENSii set to be used commercially in the near future.
This project was jointly supervised by Associate Professor Tele Tan and Professor Geoff West in association with Mr Steve van Blommestein from the Netlink Group.
This one year project is part of the Software Engineering course conducted at the Department of Computing where final-year students work in teams on a major industry led project, utilising the broad range of skills and knowledge acquired through the entire course.
