As part of the Aveiro Tech Week 2022, the 1st edition of Aveiro Tech City Hackathon took place between the 10th and the 14th of October, where 118 participants subdivided by 26 teams, from companies and universities, were called to develop innovative and disruptive solutions to a set of challenges promoted by technology-based companies from Aveiro’s ecosystem.

The challenge proposed by Altice Labs sought to explore disruptive approaches and technologies, accelerators for the development of a prototype for predicting the Olympic potential of young athletes and in training, able to function as a “digital scout”.

It uses computer vision through a smartphone to collect and monitor the execution of physical exercises in real time. The prototype would also have to analyze the history of previously performed exercises, as well as the biometric information collected in the meantime, for a more assertive prediction of potential, as well as for the prescription of exercise plans.

The challenge was launched by Altice Labs in the broad sense, without any kind of restriction in the approach and choice of technologies, reinforcing the maximization of use of solutions already available as-a-service in public clouds.

From the 26 teams competing to the 5 challenges presented, 5 competed to AlticeLabs’ challenge, with one dropping out.

During the 5 days of the challenge, all teams embraced it with a true sense of mission, responsibility and entrepreneurship, having achieved excellent results with functional prototypes and with almost all the required functional coverage.

Despite the excellent results achieved, synthesized in the final pitch made in person by all teams at the facilities of Fábrica da Ciência Viva, the winning team SmartGains stands out, composed by young university students from Aveiro, in the areas of Computer Engineering and Robotics, having won the prize of 5.000€.

It was with great merit that it was well demonstrated that young, dynamic and highly focused teams, without procedural ties and without technological constraints, are able to achieve extraordinary results, enhanced by the reuse and integration of value-added technologies of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence already available in the open market of cloud services.

It was also clear to Altice Labs the importance of this type of event in the search for talent and continuous renewal of its innovative capacity.