Lifebility Award: Three Sustainable Startups Awarded

Lifebility Award focuses on projects designed to change, at least in a small way, people’s lives. Teams made up of young people, with founders no older than 35. And support offered to winners that goes beyond simple financial support: for the entire duration of the initiative, and beyond, tutors are available to candidates to refine ideas and transform them into businesses capable of scaling.

This is the recipe for the Lifebility Award, an initiative that has reached its 14th edition and is supported by the Lions Association (in particular by the Multidistretto Italia 108) and which counts among its alumni cases of global success such as Brescia’s Isinnova.

Lifebility Award selected three winning ideas

Also this year the jury of the Lifebility Award, composed of experts and stakeholders from industry and academia, has selected three winning ideas from the many applications (over 1,500 proposals have been received over the years), which have taken home 5,000 euros each. Three winning projects of the Lifebility Award, all three very different from each other: united however by the possibility of creating a positive change in the lives of potential users, aiming to solve small and large daily problems.

“In the 14th edition of the Lifebility Award, we celebrate the innovation and extraordinary potential of young Italian startuppers – explained Claudio Sabatini , President of the Council of Governors of Lions Italia in a note – As Lions Multidistretto Italy 108, we feel the duty to support these initiatives. We are firmly convinced that young people can actually make a difference in defining our future”.

The winners of the 2024 edition were ARGO , AI Vs Linfomi and RigeneraDermo : “tangible examples of how youth commitment can lead to significant and sustainable changes in our society” concluded Sabattini.

What does ARGO do?

The key, in this case, is accessibility: ARGO – the name of a wearable device created by Sara Labidi, Giuseppe Campanale, and Daniela Bigon of the Iuav University – was designed to allow blind and visually impaired people to swim in the pool without the need for a companion. ARGO received the Lifebility Award.

“The main goal of Argo is to increase the autonomy and inclusion of blind swimmers, allowing them to swim safely and independently – say the three creators of the project – Furthermore, the project aims to respond to the needs of a wide audience, including those who use the pool for rehabilitation or physiotherapy”.

ARGO is applied to goggles, an essential accessory in the pool, and through a series of vibrations it is able to communicate to the swimmer when to make a turn or when he is deviating from the center line of the lane. The wearable , developed thanks to the advice of a visually impaired swimmer, constantly communicates with two remote devices to be placed at the two ends of the occupied lane: the latter contain a series of ultrasonic sensors, lasers and photocells, to guide the effort in the pool.

AI vs Lymphoma

We live in an age of data abundance, but the almost infinite amount of information cannot always be easily managed simply through the commitment of researchers. For this reason, Gaia Martire and Domenico Rizzato have developed an application infused with artificial intelligence capable of reviewing databases containing precious information collected in various studies of different scientific fields, so as to evaluate with a comprehensive view the biological effects of Burkitt lymphoma (BL) and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), the most common types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in childhood. The project also received the Lifebility Award.

These are rather serious forms of cancer, with survival rates that are still quite low, especially in the case of recurrence, but in which some recent studies have highlighted common traits among patients who have managed to overcome them. “We will perform exome sequencing (WES) and transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq) to identify the molecular characteristics that influence the prognosis of patients,” explain the two researchers.

“Then, an unsupervised analysis will identify groups of patients with common characteristics based on multiomic data ( information collected from different areas of biological study that analyze the complete set of molecular components of an organism ).” The final goal is to increase understanding of how the disease develops , also by evaluating the effectiveness (or side effects) of medical treatments.

RegenerateDermo

A project in the name of circular economy, created on the slopes of the Prosecco hills and which for this reason aims to exploit the waste product of winemaking, also received the Lifebility Award. The idea of ​​Marco Ferrari , father of RigeneraDermo , is to give life to a cosmetics supply chain based on grape pomace, with a particular eye also to the sustainability of the packaging: no plastic bottles, but refillable tetrapack packages .

Ferrari has also thought of two different sales and distribution channels. The B2B one with HoReCa: making good quality products for toilets and rooms available to hotels and restaurants, in reusable and sustainable packaging, and guaranteeing constant supplies. And then, of course, the B2C: in this case the virtuous circle that eliminates plastic will be made easier by a refill mechanism guaranteed by a simplified purchase via special QR codes placed on the packaging, with the refills arriving directly to the end customer’s home.

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(Featured image by micheile henderson via Unsplash)

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First published in StartupItalia. A third-party contributor translated and adapted the article from the original. In case of discrepancy, the original will prevail.

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