Having received submissions from 39 innovative projects, the UNITA Innovation Prize in the hubs category (circular ecoconmy, renewable energy, cultural heritage) was awarded to Heliocity, a spin-off from LOCIE laboratory (Université Savoie Mont Blanc, CNRS - Centre national de la recherche scientifique) founded in 2020.
Heliocity offers unique remote inspection tools with which to analyse the health of solar power plants in the built environment, to guide cost-effective operation and maintenance practices and secure revenues. Deployed as SaaS, Heliocity’s solutions offer punctual and continuous assessments of system performance, to support acceptance tests, validate maintenance gains, and enable reactive and proactive identification of performance losses.
Team: Emeric Eyraud, President & Co-Founder, Leon Gaillard CTO & Co-Founder
« Our unique software core combines complex data analysis methods and multi-physics models of building-integrated solar systems (digital twins), built on 15 years of public research. The approach is highly versatile thanks to the high-fidelity model with a limited set of parameters allowing to adapt to any solar installation technology and building without weather sensors. »
In the no-hubs category, the winner is MAiCRO, an innovative research project from Universidad de Zaragoza. They are developing a software based on image processing and artificial intelligence for the early detection of eye diseases.
MAiCRO is a pioneering method in eye disease detection because it considers macroscopic and microscopic levels simultaneously. In the clinical validation phase, MAiCRO proved able to detect eye diseases before the existence of any clinical sign with a 97 % success rate, and up to 100 % if clinical signs were observed.
Team: Dr Alejandra Consejo, assistant professor is a Physicist specializing in biomedical engineering and vision science, Prof. Laura Remón, a specialist in contactology and eye disease, Irene Trillo-Moreno, clinical optometrist, and Andrés García-Jiménez, mechanical engineering specializing in corneal biomechanics.
The research team at Universidad de Zaragoza is supported by international collaborators from Poland, Belgium, and Australia. The team of 15 researchers (8 women, 7 men) is formed by Physicists, Engineers, Ophthalmology doctors, Opticians, and Optometrists.