Team Ayuda, the representative of the Ateneo de Zamboanga University (AdZU) from the College of Science of Information Technology (CSIT), bagged the Ericsson Technology for Good Award during the 14th SWEEP Innovation and Excellence Awards last May 11, 2018.
Nicole Ivan Marquez, Julienne Veronica Tuazon, Aimee Primrose Tubio, and Genesis Dale Larroder, all 4th year Electronics and Communications Engineering students, along with Jessica Partosa, their mentor, attended the 14th SWEEP Innovation and Excellence Awards at Green Sun, Makati City where they bagged the Ericsson Technology for Good Award.
Ericsson, a company that provides hardware and software for improving communications technology, has been at the forefront for innovating and creating products and services that puts the welfare of society and the greater good first.
Their project, Ayuda, is a disaster management web application that registers evacuees in the cloud as well as their evacuation site location and contact number. The evacuees’ records are entered into an online database to keep track of their basic information. This project aims to assist relatives of the affected individuals locate their families after calamities strike. This is especially helpful these days since the number of Internally Displaced People (IDP) in the Philippines has increased. IDPs are people who are forced to leave their homes due to or in order to avoid calamities, both manmade and natural.
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), an organization that provides statistics for internally displaced or at risk individuals, of the 103,797,000 Filipinos, 445,000 have been displaced due to conflict and violence and 2,529,000 have been displaced due to disasters since December 2017. These people have been relocated to safe places for medium-term arrangements.
News now sweeps the nation of displaced families looking for their loved ones after fleeing their homes. In light of the rising political unrest and consecutive natural disasters, Ayuda could help these families locate each other.
Ayuda, the Chabacano word for “help” summarizes what the team sets out to do. Carrying the Ignatian values of being men and women for others, the team sets out to prove that Ayuda helps.
