The UOC is holding its 12th SpinUOC entrepreneurship event with eight innovative projects

SpinUOC, the annual Hubbik programme that promotes entrepreneurial technology initiatives from the UOC community, will be taking place for the 12th time on 27 June starting at 7 p.m. at the Old Estrella Damm Brewery in Barcelona (Carrer del Rosselló, 515), with eight projects that have reached the final going on stage.

The finalists, which include projects in fields such as health, teaching, inclusion and commerce, and feature tools that integrate artificial intelligence, are competing for three prizes, which have a significantly higher financial endowment this year: two awards of €10,000 for the best entrepreneurial project (decided by the panel of judges) and for the initiative with the greatest social impact (decided by the Ramon Molinas Foundation) respectively; and a prize of €3,000 for the project with the most votes from the audience.

The entrepreneurs competing in SpinUOC will each have about five minutes to give their presentation to the audience in an innovative way, and they will later have the opportunity to network. The event is free to attend as a member of the audience, but you must first register via this form.

The event, held under the slogan We can help your project take off, will also be streamed live on the UOC's YouTube channel from 7 p.m., although the start will be an hour earlier, at 6 p.m., when viewers will be able to watch live interviews with the university's entrepreneurial community.

More than a decade and 100 finalists

Àngels Fitó, the Rector of the UOC, stressed the importance of SpinUOC, which is aligned with one of the university's missions, namely "to meet the expectations, dreams and hopes of our community, students, alumni and staff". She said that entrepreneurship "is inevitable, essential", and that the UOC has been a keen promoter of this programme since it started in 2013, integrating it "into our way of doing things and our training programmes". More than 1,500 projects have been presented since then and, with the 2024 edition, 100 initiatives have reached the final phase. For Fitó, SpinUOC highlights the importance of "perseverance, environment and talent" in facilitating the entrepreneurial spirit of the university community.

Professor Xavier Vilajosana, vice rector for Research, Knowledge Transfer and Entrepreneurship, said that SpinUOC is one of the UOC's key programmes in its "strategy to promote entrepreneurship, providing expert support to our community's innovative projects and raising their profile". This "consolidates the UOC's connection with its local surroundings in its commitment to promoting entrepreneurship, helping to strengthen the economic and social fabric," he said.

An app for teaching staff to gamify lessons

Daniel Benítez, holder of a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering from the UOC, together with Aleix Riba and Toni Gutiérrez, will present the ARCamp app at SpinUOC. This app is aimed, among others, at teaching staff who want to use new tools in their teaching. "Imagine you're a secondary school teacher and you have to explain feudal society to a group of teenagers", said Benítez. "Getting them to read a book and listen to an explanation is increasingly unlikely to succeed", he said. This is where his technological proposal comes into play: students are invited to "go on an adventure" using their mobile phones.

A set of characters on the app explain the stratified society in which they lived. "The texts and characters have been created by you, as a teacher, through the web app". By using QR codes, GPS and augmented reality on a mobile phone, "you can gamify any visit to a museum, outdoor activity or classroom-based lesson".

The project has been under way for more than two years and has already been tested on users. With its presence at SpinUOC, the ARCamp team is confident that their application can be successfully launched on the market.

A robot to put an end to queuing at concerts and festivals

Arnau Camps, student of the Master's Degree in Digital Innovation and Transformation, is one of the promoters of Fastfest, a start-up that has developed El Metabar, a high-capacity self-service automatic drink-pouring machine to optimize purchasing processes at bars in large events. Camps explained that Fastfest solves problems encountered "at least once by 99% of festival goers when placing an order". These are problems such as "long queues to order a drink or mistakes when processing the order". The events themselves can also have problems relating to waiter management and performance. This is why, according to Camps, El Metabar is a good solution for the approximately 1,000 festivals and more than 60,000 concerts held in Spain each year, in addition to sporting or hospitality industry events.

Fastfest helps reduce queues, operating and staff costs, while increasing sales. El Metabar provides a quick service through a touch screen, where you can order and pay with contactless technology. Finally, all you have to do is place the reusable cup in the pouring area to fill it. The robot also allows sponsoring companies to advertise on the screens and quantify the impacts of this advertising thanks to the generation and storage of data by the machines. All this is through a cloud service that also, for example, provides live monitoring of sales and stock needs, analyses attendees' consumption preferences and predicts demand.

By participating in SpinUOC, the authors of the project seek to create synergies with the university and any organizations interested in their initiative.

Reducing the digital divide for people with disabilities and older people

Gustavo Alberto Hincapié, holder of a Master's Degree in Accessible Technologies from the UOC, is one of the people behind IncluTIC, a technology laboratory for the inclusion of people with disabilities and older people. As he explained, the project is "a comprehensive strategy to reduce the digital divide by creating inclusion opportunities for people with disabilities and older people".

IncluTIC provides a "comprehensive resource centre" for producing the design and strategy to help people put in place a hardware, software or furniture solution tailored to their specific physical, sensory or cognitive needs. The aim is to facilitate their social, education and workplace inclusion. The project also supports public and private organizations to help them with inclusive design and strategies to make their products and services more accessible.

The project originated as a spin-off of Diseño Universal Tecnoayudas, a company with broad experience in the inclusion of people with disabilities in Colombia. In 2003, the team behind the project created Colombia's first disability website and promoted the creation of the NGO Corporación Discapacidad Colombia.

Digital support for women approaching menopause

Talia Leibovitz, a course instructor with the UOC's Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences, brings to SpinUOC the Kala project, a digital platform that provides comprehensive support to women approaching the menopause. Leibovitz noted that menopause is a natural and physiological process that all women go through at some time around the age of 50.

Despite affecting around five million women in Spain alone, there is no dedicated app for this process. Kala provides a mobile platform to help with prevention, monitoring and physical and mental treatment for women at this stage of life. The platform has been designed taking into account the perspective of menopausal women, something that Leibovitz considers "key" to achieving comprehensive monitoring.

The team behind Kala hope that participating in SpinUOC will enable them to consolidate their project and obtain new sources of funding.

AI for efficient preparation of language lessons

Laura Gutiérrez and Noé Casas, participants of the UOC's EduTECH Emprèn entrepreneurship programme, present the Langtern project, which is aimed at language teachers. Langtern is a platform that allows teachers to produce their own teaching materials easily and quickly thanks to its content search and artificial intelligence engines.

The platform provides a database of online materials, such as YouTube videos, news items and short stories, searchable by keyword or difficulty level. The AI engine allows you to create exercises automatically from the materials themselves, and students can do the exercises on the mobile app or the website. The business model for this project is a monthly subscription. The founders explained that participating in SpinUOC will enable them to help empower language teachers with a tool that facilitates their work, making it more efficient.

Comprehensive management of electric vehicle charging points

Doro Rodríguez, a student of the Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration and Management, and Rômulo Batista, an IT engineer specializing in software and digital innovation project management, will present SmartMoob, their comprehensive cloud-based electric charging point management (SaaS) platform, at SpinUOC. The project provides a piece of software that facilitates "the launch, operation and scaling of smart charging businesses for electric vehicles, with advanced monitoring, automated billing and energy optimization, and that is compatible with plug-and-play technology".

Its promoters explained that the project encourages "the adoption of electric mobility, the consolidation of energy efficiency and other environmental measures". The sector has more than 300,000 electric vehicles in Spain and around 30,000 charging points - more than 10,000 of them installed last year - and this is expected to increase significantly in the next few years.

A virtual twin relieving the stress of instant communication

Cristina Grau, a student of the Master's Degree in Data Science, will present Twintual, a project involving a virtual twin that replicates a user's behaviour and which, as she explained, is "perfect for people exposed to a large volume of messages, professionals with tight agendas and those who appreciate efficiency in digital communication". The tool is aimed at anyone who spends a lot of time every day answering messages and emails and who, in spite of this, is unable to answer them all. "Every day we face information overload and stress due to instant communication", said Grau.

The Twintual project is based on a clear problem in society validated by a study of 300 people. Twintual is a virtual twin that "replicates a user's behaviour in conversations in a human-like way through any channel". It can be accessed from any device and "keeps the user up to date on what they've missed and what's been handled on their behalf while they were unavailable or if their priorities have changed". The user is always in control and can adjust the level of autonomy. The authors of the initiative have experience with digital projects for US institutions such as Harvard, and their aim with SpinUOC is to find strategic collaborators who back their idea and business model.

Non-invasive brain stimulation for mental and neurological disorders

Elena Muñoz Marrón, a member of the Faculty of Health Sciences and joint lead researcher of the NeuroADaS Lab group of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya's (UOC) eHealth Center, will present the UNNE project, "an innovative evidence-based solution for the treatment of mental and neurological disorders". It is an initiative based on non-invasive brain stimulation, a technique that, according to Muñoz, "makes it possible to modify the altered brain activity found in different disorders". She said that this stimulation makes it possible to achieve "greater and faster recoveries" in people with conditions such as depression, anxiety or Alzheimer's, or those who have had a stroke, which together affect more than 2 billion people worldwide.

The UNNE project provides specialized treatment to patients, as well as training and consulting to organizations that want to add non-invasive brain stimulation to their services. The people responsible for it are already working with a hospital group in Spain and hope that SpinUOC will help them "finish shaping the proposal and increase the presence in the entrepreneurial ecosystem that brings so much value to society".

SpinUOC is a programme for the promotion of entrepreneurship at the UOC coordinated by the Hubbik platform and with the support of Estrella Damm, the Ramon Molinas Foundation, 4 Years From Now, and the Ministry of Research and Universities of the Government of Catalonia, with co-funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

UOC R&I

The UOC's research and innovation (R&I) is helping overcome pressing challenges faced by global societies in the 21st century by studying interactions between technology and human & social sciences with a specific focus on the network society, e-learning and e-health.

Over 500 researchers and more than 50 research groups work in the UOC's seven faculties, its eLearning Research programme and its two research centres: the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the eHealth Center (eHC).

The university also develops online learning innovations at its eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC), as well as UOC community entrepreneurship and knowledge transfer via the Hubbik platform.

Open knowledge and the goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development serve as strategic pillars for the UOC's teaching, research and innovation. More information: research.uoc.edu.