The European Patent Office EPO, for its acronym in English, will celebrate the tenth edition of the European Inventor Award on June 11 in Paris. For this reason, on April 21, the 12 finalists who will fight to win this recognized title were announced.
More than 300 inventors applied this year, with representatives from Austria, Australia, China, France, Japan, Latvia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The finalists were grouped into 5 categories. A winner will be chosen in each one and the public will be able to vote online on June 11 to choose the best invention. Find below a list of finalists by category.
Industry
Jean Christopher Giron (France)
Giron has invented the “smart window” glass, a material to revolutionize the construction industry. For this French inventor, the sun is a source of energy that makes people happier and more productive, however, current buildings do not take advantage of solar radiation. On the contrary, they block it by restricting the view to the outside.
For this reason, Giron’s invention captures and regulates solar radiation depending on the situation. During winter this energy is used to heat the interiors and in summer to prevent overheating, saving large amounts of electricity.
Gunnar Asplund (Sweden)
The use of nuclear energy and the announced scarcity of fossil energy, has turned renewable energy sources into the future. However, the main sources of renewable energy, such as solar energy, are found in places completely isolated from civilization, that is, very far from their final consumer. As a consequence, large amounts of energy are lost during transmission.
Asplund has created a reliable and efficient transmission source that makes it possible to transfer energy over long distances, through a network of cables that can go underground or over water for thousands of kilometers without losing a volt.
Franz Amtmann, Philippe Mougars (Austria, France)
These entrepreneurs and their team have developed NFC (Near Field Communication), a secure method of transferring information between mobile devices. This technology is based on encrypted radio transmissions. Its success is being reflected to a large extent by the security it offers to make mobile payments, such as Apple Pay. Additionally, it offers a higher transfer speed.
Small and medium businesses
Laura Johanna van’t Veer (Holland)
Van`t Veer has developed a genetic tissue test, which shows women with early stages of breast cancer if they need chemotherapy. The objective of this product is to prevent women who do not really need these measures from subjecting themselves to the side effects that this well-known method brings to end cancer.
Michel Lescanne (France)
Around the world there are 51 million children under 5 years of age who suffer from malnutrition. Approximately 1 million die annually.
Taking into account this great social problem, Lescanne has developed an oil-based therapeutic food called PlumpyNut. It is a delicious peanut paste that can be eaten without mixing it with water, a great advantage considering the scarcity of this resource in crisis regions.
Jhon Elvesjö and Mårten Skogö (Sweden)
These Swedish inventors have created a system to turn the human eye into a computer mouse. This technology uses an infrared sensor that records eye movements to know the direction in which the user is looking.
This product makes it possible for people with movement disabilities, such as the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, to be able to communicate with their environment.
Research
Luke Alphey (UK)
This British scientist has invented a method to combat dengue, a disease that, according to the World Health Organization, puts half of the planet’s population at risk.
This infection produced by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which inhabits tropical and subtropical regions, has begun to spread over the years, reaching urban areas.
Alpheys has created a method that does not directly attack the disease but the mosquito. Through genetic experiments, he found a way to control the population of mosquitoes that transmit the virus, eliminating their ability to reproduce.
Hendrik Marius Jonkers (Holland)
Jonkers is reinventing concrete, the quintessential construction material. Using the properties of a bacterium that generates limestone naturally, he has created bioconcrete, a material that rebuilds itself and can last up to 200 years. At the moment a crack is generated in the concrete, the bacteria activates, rebuilding the damaged part.
Although this material is more expensive than normal concrete, it has the possibility of increasing the life of not only buildings but also streets, highways and bridges without the need for maintenance.
Ludwik Leibler (France)
Leibler has invented the first environmentally friendly plastic called Vitrimers. Through extensive research on polymers, he has created a material that is recyclable and can be repaired with the use of heat. In the same way, this material can be molded like metal, making it possible to generate complex shapes that would be impossible to achieve with current molding technologies.
Inventions from non-European countries
Ian Frazer, Jian Zhou (Australia, China)
These scientists from the University of Queensland have changed women’s health forever, through the creation of the cervical cancer vaccine. This vaccine has already saved a large number of women’s lives in developing countries.
Sumio Lijima, Akira Koshio, Masako Yudasaka (Japan)
This group of Japanese has discovered carbon nanotubes, a structure with excellent physical properties that offers the possibility of making existing technology faster, lighter and even more powerful.
This material is half the meso of aluminum, is stronger than steel and is also a conductor of heat and electricity. These characteristics are applicable to all existing technological devices, from our computers and telephones to airplanes and solar modules.
Elizabeth Holmes (United States)
Selected as the youngest billionaire according to Forbes magazine this year, she has revolutionized the way blood tests are performed. This enterprising woman has found a method to generate a wide variety of analyzes with just a drop of blood, in just a few hours. Conventional tests require considerable amounts of blood in some cases, can become painful, are expensive, and results are obtained in no less than 24 hours.
Achievements for your work and research
The European Patent Office will also award Ivars Kalvins (Latvia) for his research and his work to cure and prevent diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, to Kornelis A. Schouhamer Immink (Netherlands) for the creation of the CD and the Blue Ray already Andreas Manz (Switzerland) for the invention of the lab-on-a-chip.
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