Inventor Hsieh Fa-lien (謝發連), 88, on Saturday won a gold medal at the World Genius Convention in Tokyo for his ergonomic pillow design.
The Taiwanese team of inventors won 29 golds, 17 silvers and five special prizes at the convention, beating 11 other nations in total awards, including the US, Canada, China and Russia, team leader and Chinese Innovation and Invention Society secretary-general Wu Chih-yao (吳智堯) said.
The 31-year-old convention had 150 entries this year, 58 of which were submitted by the Taiwanese team, he said.
Photo: CNA
Hsieh, a first-time participant of the event, said he was born in the Japanese colonial era and that he has a high-school education.
The pillow has a stainless steel frame that allows the user to make adjustments to its height and width while remaining cool in hot weather.
“Hearing the good news from Japan is like a dream,” Hsieh added.
Chen Yan-ting (陳彥廷) invented another gold-medal winner: an alert system linking wheelchair gyros to mobile devices, which warns users of falls and other dangers.
Chen, who received the Presidential Educational Award on Friday, has brittle-bone disease and is a student of business management at TransWorld University.
A previous version of the invention last year won gold at the Ukraine International Exhibition of Inventions.
Chen said he designed the system with his professor Chang Hung-jung (張宏榮) to address the absence of automatic alert features on most wheelchairs.
The alert system connects with a user’s mobile device via Bluetooth and broadcasts audio warnings when it senses sudden changes in the chair’s direction, speed, balance or other factors that might lead to danger, Chen said.
A medical device that automatically caps needles after use, designed by Tzu Chi University of Science and Technology nursing professor Lin Chu-chun (林祝君) and her students, won a gold medal and a special award.
The device protects medical professionals from needle-stick injuries by eliminating the window of vulnerability between using a syringe and capping it, she said.
Taiwanese manufacturers have expressed interest in commercial application and mass production for the domestic market, which buys 5 million needles annually, reducing the cost of each needle to less than NT$3, Lin said.
Another gold medal and special award went to Chung Hua University civil engineering professors Lin Chen-hua (林振華) and Chang Chih-wei (張奇偉) for their infrared sensor-bearing drone that inspects high-rises for tile damage.
Lin said damaged tiles — which can cause death or injury if they fall — have a higher temperature than intact tiles that infrared images can detect.
The sensor reduces the risk to workers and lowers the cost of inspection to 5 percent of what work crews would cost, he said.
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