Michelle Caffrey
Reporter - Philadelphia Business Journal
Philadelphia's aging infrastructure could benefit from the winning idea of the first-ever Comcast-Pennovation Challenge, after a multidisciplinary team of University of Pennsylvania students took home the grand prize by designing internet of things technology that can monitor the stability of bridges.
Tied in with Comcast’s sponsorship of Penn’s new Pennovation Center, the inaugural contest was launched last fall to spur student and faculty development of IoT applications using Comcast’s new machineQ network, a Low Power Wide Area Network that can power smart cities and industrial IoT tech. (The network, which was first piloted in Philadelphia and the Bay area, will be expanded into 12 other major cities, Comcast announced last week.)
The winning team, Viewpoint, is composed of students from Penn’s Master of Integrated Product Design program and School of Design’s Historic Preservation department who designed technology that uses connected monitoring devices to visualize railway and roadway bridges’ structural stability.
“We were impressed with the strength of the idea, the quality of the technology, the breadth of the team and most importantly, its potential societal impact,” Vijay Kumar, dean of engineering at Penn, said in a statement.
Viewpoint will now join Penn’s I-Corp Program, designed to help them discover clients and create a business plan, and will also receive a six-month Pennovation Center membership and $3,000 in cash.
There is potential for a real-world, local impact of Viewpoint's technology as well, as they plan to team up with researchers at both Drexel University and Penn, as well as the city of Philadelphia, to pilot the tech on the city's aging bridges.
The American Road and Transportation Builders Association's 2017 Bridge Report showed that 20 percent of Pennsylvania's bridges, 4,506, are classified as structurally deficient — the second highest amount in the U.S. The top 15 most traveled structurally deficient bridges in the state are in Philadelphia.
Michelle Caffrey covers technology and education for the Philadelphia Business Journal.
