PM Network - February 2015

10 PM NETWORK FEBRUARY 2015 WWW.PMI.ORG theEdge

THAILAND’S
TASTING ROBOT

Fed up with subpar Thai food abroad, the Thai government sponsored a project to ensure purveyors of the country’s cuisine meet its exacting standards around the world. The Thai Delicious Committee, overseen by the government’s National Innovation Agency, unveiled its “ e-delicious” tasting robot in September.

Using 10 sensors to determine taste and smell, the boxy contraption works by tasting dishes and measuring the chemical signature of the food against a government-approved standard recipe for the same dish. It then computes a rating out of 100; any score below 80 indicates inauthenticity.

The project team spent about a year developing e-delicious, developer Krit Chongsrid, PhD, told ABC News. Syncing the smell and taste sensors was the most difficult part of the US$100,000 robot project. “There is a 5 to 10 percent error probability,” Dr. Chongsrid said.

His team hopes to produce at least 100 of the machines, with the goal of selling each for US$18,000 to Thai embassies in countries with many Thai restaurants. In addition to the taster, the committee produced a free app named Thai Delicious that offers officially approved recipes, as well as a logo restaurants can display on menus if they use government-backed recipes.

E-delicious isn’t the world’s first electronic tasting robot—previous projects have delivered a beer-tasting robot in Spain and a wine-tasting robot in Denmark. But it is the first devoted to Thai food.

“We wanted the cheapest and easi-
est approach to measure food,” Sirapat
Pratontep, PhD, a nanotechnology expert
who led the robot’s development, told The
New York Times. “You just put in the food
and you get a rating.” —Brittany Nims
but bad ideas are killed pretty quickly,”
Ms. Bailey says. “The ideas where you have
clinical, engineering and business buy-in—
those are the ideas that take shape.”

A New Kind of Ambulance

One CAMTech innovation has taken shape in Uganda.

During a 2013 hackathon in Mbarara, Uganda, a team visited a local maternity ward where a woman was hemorrhaging. Nurses explained that, like many patients, she did not have access to reliable transportation so she could not get to the hospital quickly. Ambulances are often in a state of disrepair.

So the team created an innovation that took advantage of a widespread mode of transportation that Uganda does have: motorcycles. By the end of the hackathon, the team designed a stretcher that could be attached to motorcycles, turning them into makeshift ambulances.

After winning a CAMTech award of US$10,000, the project team has continued to develop its prototype, which is now in its third iteration.

“We’re very interested in commercial viability,” Ms. Bailey says. “Our agenda is to build entrepreneurial capacity to generate a pipeline of products that have the potential to be innovative, impactful and viable.”

Incentivizing Stakeholders

To ensure hackathons attract talented participants, CAMTech relies on partners such as the Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda and Glocal Healthcare in India, as well as extensive outreach through social media.

Yet there are stakeholders beyond the hackers with their own—sometimes conflicting—agendas. One CAMTech funder, the United States Agency for International Development, seeks innovations bolstering maternal and child health in India, Ms. Bailey says. Meanwhile, corporate sponsors may want to continue to serve higher-end markets in low-income and developed countries, while expanding their reach into developing markets.

Securing buy-in from the myriad funders and other stakeholders while remaining aligned with CAMTech’s global health mission is “one of the things that keeps me up at night,” Ms. Bailey says.

To guarantee that buy-in, funders promote their own agendas by awarding prizes. For instance, brewing company Anheuser-Busch InBev has sponsored awards for innovations addressing road safety, a major public health issue. (Nine out of every 10 deaths due to traffic collisions occur in low- and middle-income countries, according to the World Health Organization.) “If you create just a small incentive around a specific challenge, you drive activity in that area,” Ms. Bailey says.