On Thursday 30 January, two EMLV teams were invited to pitch their projects in front of a jury of representatives from Orange and 5G, innovation and design experts. EMLV students presented 5G technology solutions developed as part of their 5th year Junior Consultant Projects, which are helping to improve daily lives of visually impaired and deaf people.
200 selected students from 6 Grandes Ecoles, and 10 projects selected out of 39 applications for the final stage of the “Young Talents” contest, organised by Orange with the theme “Invent the future, with 5G”. Among the high-potential projects selected to pitch on 30 January in front of the jury of experts were C-You and Oracio, two technology solutions developed by students from the class of 2020.
Un travail de 3 mois à l’@EMLVparis pour préparer un pitch de 4 minutes…. un joli moyen de faire grandir nos étudiants aussi bien personnellement que professionnellement pic.twitter.com/8XtHsPwa4R
— B. Durand-Megret (@BDurandMegret) January 30, 2020
C-You, the 5G-connected glasses
The project developed by Thomas GARMROUGUIAN, Fiona GUAYROSO, Kahina LAKHDARI, Gaëtan LOPEZ, Julie OKUR, students in Marketing, Innovation & Distribution and Digital Marketing Strategy specializations, aimed to answer the question: “How can 5G improve the autonomy of blind and visually impaired people when moving around the city?”.
So, what’s the solution? Getting a pair of smartglasses. This device, with embedded micro-cameras and microphone, makes urban transportation easier for visually impaired people. With the improvement of real-time data processing and the increased efficiency of communication between connected objects that 5G technology will provide, the customer benefit of 5G-connected smartglasses is the improved comfort, safety and time-saving customer experience for visually impaired people navigating urban environments.
” I particularly appreciated support from our teachers in this project. They accompanied us through all stages and helped us whenever we needed it. The fact that we started from a central idea of a group of students and turned it into a real solution, based on interviews with blind people, is what motivates me.” (Gaëtan Lopez, promo 2020)
” By taking part in this contest we took away an enriching experience. This project allowed us to sharpen our soft and hard skills and to develop our professional network. Being selected for the final was very rewarding and has given us confidence in ourselves and our skills. We would like to thank the Pele Leonard De Vinci for giving us the opportunity to implement our skills through this consulting project. (Kahina Lakhdari, promo 2020)
Oracio, a 5G application for the hearing impaired
The application was developed by :Janice METTE, Tiémoko SANGARE, Parsival EDJEOU, Christophe LOU et Augustin PORRETTI. It allows facilitation of communication between deaf people and others thanks to 5G, and therefore, better social integration.
The five-students team relied on an exploratory qualitative study to examine the daily lives of hearing and speaking impaired people, and to look at their entourage and civil society organisations, active in the field of social inclusion of people with disabilities.
Available on Android or Ios systems, this free app would convert French Sign Language into text and speech.
Deaf persons will be able to communicate normally thanks to a near instantaneous translation function from and to both sign language and written language. The application also holds an one-click emergency services function.
The future of 5G with Orange: The Junior Consultant’s ambitious challenge
The Young Talents contest organised by Orange called on 200 master’s students in design, engineering, marketing and digital technologies to create solutions that simplify daily life of consumers, drawing on the possibilities opened up by 5G in different industries.
Since September 2019, 39 projects have been developed by students which address 11 themes: social inclusion, digital and environmental protection, different ways of consuming, and so on.
25 experts in the fields of tech, innovation and design met three times with the EMLV students, allowing them to ask their questions about the initial idea, the vision of the project and the steps to be followed on a week-by-week basis.
The objective of the open innovation contest: putting technology at the service of people and the environment.
In this sense, the Junior Consultant Projects allow to implement innovative business ideas, within the framework of project assignment completed in teams of 4 – 5 students in 5thyear. Students take all the steps of project design, from data processing, description of the problem, to operational recommendations and completion of a deliverable.
Creating kind and diplomatic relations with client companies, making the link between the briefing and implementation stages, using client feedback, being a source of proposals, adapting to the precise demands of companies- these are all challenges that EMLV’s students involved in junior consultant assignments have to meet within the framework of their final year projects.
These practical missions are sticking points of the business school curriculum. Students put their knowledge at the service of partner companies while being tutored by EMLV faculty and company representatives.
