At the 6th National Institute of Technology Deep Learning Contest (DCON2025), which was held for two days from Friday, May 9, Reiwa 7, the “NAGARA” team of TOYOTA KOSEN won the grand prize.
DCON is a contest in which teams consisting mainly of National Institute of Technology students create works that utilize “manufacturing technology” and “deep learning” and compete on the “business potential” created by the works based on the company’s valuation, and this year, a record number of 95 teams (42 National Institute of Technology) participated.
NAGARA is a team of seven people, led by fifth-year students in the Department of Information and Computer Engineering, including one student Computer Science Course and one third-year student in the Department of Information and Computer Engineering. Focusing on the nursing care industry, where digitalization has not yet penetrated, the students took on the challenge of this contest with the aim of innovating the way nursing care should be through the power of AI.
The nursing care industry is in need of digitalization (nursing care DX) due to a serious labor shortage. However, at present, due to the “lack of staff skills and DX know-how”, existing solutions have not been able to achieve nursing care DX. Therefore, based on interviews with more than 40 nursing care facilities, we have developed a unique wearable terminal service that uses AI-based voice recognition and real-time transcription to reflect the record of a conversation between a caregiver and the elderly. In addition, it has an automatic record and meeting minutes creation function and a caregiver record search function using AI chat, which is expected to reduce office work by 10,000 hours per year.
The company valuation of the works they created is “700 million yen”, which is very high compared to the DCON2023 (350 million yen) and DOCN2024 (400 million yen) grand prize works. The judges commented, “In addition to the magnitude of the social issue of nursing care, I highly appreciate the fact that it conveyed an overwhelming sense of the workplace,” and we are also paying attention to brushing up the work for starting a business in the future.
[DCON Official Website]
https://dcon.ai/
【Results】
https://dcon.ai/news/20250510001/
[Final Selection Archive]
https://youtu.be/gbulH1etEHU
[NAGARA Official Website]
https://nagarainc.com
[NAGARA Official X]
https://x.com/NAGARA_inc
[Receiving the Grand Prize]
【Participating Students】