Three Vietnamese students from HCM City University of Technology won the first prize at the nation-wide Smart Water Innovation Contest, organised by the Swedish Embassy in Hà Nội. — Photo infonet.vn

HÀ NỘI — Three Vietnamese students from HCM City University of Technology won the first prize at the nation-wide Smart Water Innovation Contest, organised by the Swedish Embassy in Hà Nội. Their idea was to develop a smart phone app to detect water leakages, the embassy announced yesterday.

Trịnh Quốc Anh, Nguyễn Trần Quang Khải and Võ Phi Long were awarded a trip to the capital of Sweden, Stockholm – known as the Beauty on Water, to attend the annually occurring global event World Water Week this August.  

The innovation came when the team discovered a high volume of water leakage in HCM City’s water system, reaching up to 30 per cent of the total, compared to 3 per cent of Tokyo’s and 4 per cent of Singapore’s, Trịnh Quốc Anh, on behalf of the winning team said.

With only a tap on the smart phone’s screen, quicker than sending an email, the people who identify the water leakage are able to report the incident to a building’s managers. The position of the leak will be bases on Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, Anh said.

The team highlighted the convenience of the app and believe that, once it is widely applied in the future, it will raise awareness of water use and save water. Their message to water users is “Today everyone has smart phones in their pockets so everyone can be a water protector”.

Speaking at the contest’s award ceremony yesterday, Sweden’s Ambassador to Việt Nam Camilla Mellander highlighted the fundamental part water management plays in a modern society.

“In the rapid development that Việt Nam has experienced in recent years, efforts to ensure access to clean water and sustainable water use have not always kept up and innovative approaches are needed to address this. We wish to continuously uphold an exchange between our countries so that we can share our experiences and learn from each other,” she said.

She also hopes that the winning team would learn a lot during World Water Week in Stockholm and in the future continue to work towards creating a more sustainable world.

According to the organising committee, this year’s entries combine reality with innovative ideas, including proposals to filter saline water in the Cửu Long (Mekong Delta) region by filtering and saving water in containers made from cactus.

Started in January this year, the contest is open to first-year through fifth-year university students across the nation and aims to inspire young, local students of higher educational institutions to take on sustainable development and climate change issues and develop innovative water-related solutions that will bring about real change.

It was held in cooperation with the Agency for Water Resources Management under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. — VNS