OSU app competition winners announced

Friday, December 12, 2014

The winning ideas in the first phase of the Oklahoma State University Mobile App Competition are Drive to win! and Fitness Telematics, which emphasize various mobile technologies that apply to insurance or “Insurance Telematics,” the theme of this year’s contest, sponsored by the OSU Mobile App Center along with AAA Oklahoma and CSAA Insurance Group.

Drive to Win team: From left Jai Rajendran (App Center), Will Dogan (CSAA Insurance Group), Manasa Reddy Narala (Student), Dheeraj Srivatsava Jami (Student), and Neal Krueger (AAA Oklahoma).

Students presented elevator pitches (short summaries used to quickly define an idea) to a panel of judges, which included representatives from the insurance companies as well as Interworks, Pivotal Labs and the app center steering committee. The panel evaluated the pitches as well as the concepts involved to select the top two winning ideas.

Dheeraj Srivatsava Jami and Manasa Reddy Narala presented the Drive to win! app idea, which would allow customers to participate in a driving challenge that trains them to drive safely and offers discounts on monthly insurance payments for high scores. Insurance companies would be able to monitor users’ driving quality based on a telematics device that uses the on-board diagnostic (OBD) port of a car.

The Fitness Telematics app idea, created and presented by Kyle Riedmann, offers a platform to collect and track data from different fitness monitoring devices such as FitBit, Android Wear, AppleWatch, etc. The idea behind the app is to encourage and report healthy habits to get discounts from a health insurance provider. The more active people are, the more discounts they will receive on their monthly health insurance payment. Fitness Telematics would help combat obesity while lowering health insurance.

Fitness Telematics team: From left Jai Rajendran (App Center), Will Dogan (CSAA Insurance Group), Kyle Riedmann (Student) and Neal Krueger (AAA Oklahoma).

The second phase of the mobile app competition is open to any students with the app programming skills to develop a functional prototype of the app. Participating teams will select one of the two winning ideas from phase one of the competition and develop a working prototype for that idea. Judges will then select one winner for each of the two ideas as the best developed app. Team registration for Phase II began on Dec. 2.

For more information, visit the OSU App Center in the lobby of the Henry Bellmon Research Center, or visit http://appcenter.okstate.edu.