Eight innovative projects being incubated at the UR’s AI and IoT incubation hub where recognized and rewarded 5,000 USD each as a startup capital to implement them. The recognition took place on 10th November 2023, during the closing of a three-day UR Innovation Week in which a university innovation Pod was inaugurated.

These projects were rewarded after they were presented to experts and found promising to be solutions to diverse societal challenges.

These innovative projects are: Rwanda Drone Innovation, Ibaba Intelligence Solutions, Smart Devise for Electricity Usage, Fraud Detection and Prevention, Farm Vision, Machine Vision based Agrculture drone, Baby Nest Project, Smart Mining Jacket based on IoT, and Made in Rwanda Silar Powered Digital Smart Storage Machine Rwanda Fridge.

Gasana Bisetsa Jururyishya, from ACEIoT who is graduating this year, whose project is named ‘Farm Vision’, said the goal is to address challenges in the agricultural sector by creating a system that enables farmers to forecast and monitor the health status of their crops. His device, which can be installed in the farm, utilizes an AI model to capture and analyze images, identifying potential issues such as pests.

“Farmers will be receiving notifications, allowing them to take timely action without physically visiting the farm, streamlining crop management and enhancing overall efficiency in agriculture”, he said.

Marie Ritha Umutoni is another innovator who completed her studies and she is graduating this year. She focused on Embedded Computing Systems at the African Centre of Excellence in Internet of Things (CEIoT). She developed a project she called ‘Ibaba Intelligence Solutions’.

She developed a security system for home surveillance and proximity detection in unsafe areas. It uses inexpensive, non-intrusive components to identify moving objects like humans, animals, and vegetation. She said, “once a motion is detected, the system can trigger actions like sounding an alarm or notifying owners via SMS or a call to alert them of a potential intruder. To achieve real-time, on-the-edge classification of moving objects, she cleverly combined analog Passive Infra-Red (PIR) sensor data with TinyML inference.”

AI and IoT incubation Hub was established at UR’s African Centre of Excellence in Internet of Things under the ‘IoT and AI Applied Research Results Commercialization through Incubation Hub project in January 2023. This project aims at establishing an Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based applied research incubation hub which is expected to facilitate the transfer of applied research prototypes and knowledge from IoT lab to market and commercialization through academia-industry collaboration. NARADA LTD, FabLab are the private industry partners that are involved in the project implementation. The network of partners is being expanded to include more private and public partners at national and international levels.

This project will see 24 prototypes developed and 8 solutions commercialized, ready to respond to societal problems in Rwanda.

Prof. Damien Hanyurwimfura is the Project lead.

Funded by Research and Innovation Systems for Africa (RISA), a program of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office(FCDO) that aims to strengthen the research and innovation ecosystem in Africa.