Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) announced that a strategic partnership has been forged with the National Sports Institute (ISN) to help improve the diet of Malaysian athletes through the development of a mobile application, iDiet Score.
The IDiet Score is a mobile application was designed to help athletes and active individuals monitor their food intake through menu plans devised using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Going forward the application can be developed is one of the products developed by UKM scholars that can be commercialised relatively soon. It is hoped that the project will wrap up development in December 2020 and then the next grant (which is a marketing grant for commercialisation) can begin to be discussed.
The ceremony was officiated by the Minister of Youth and Sports. Also present was the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Student Affairs at UKM.
Approximately 50 ISN athletes were involved in research which focused on endurance, rhythmic, strength and other active individuals. These active individuals included people who went routinely to fitness centres or gyms and who were keen on clearly defining their needs. While the application was created with athletes in mind, any tier of active individual can download the app.
A total of eight UKM researchers were involved in the project, six from the Faculty of Health Sciences and two from the Faculty of Technology and Information Science, while two were from ISN. The iDiet Score application was developed by the UKM Information Technology Center appointed as a vendor.
The ISN Chief Executive Officer stated that as a national sports institute, ISN is continually seeking to expand its strategic networks and collaborations holistically through collaborations with various domestic and foreign entities including government and private agencies.
He noted that ISN officially has entered into cooperation through the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with four public universities, namely IIUM, UPM, UKM and UTM. These collaborations will see cooperation in the fields of services, research, sports science, innovation, sports medicine and commercialisation in various fields that are the core business of ISN. The agency is ready to build a balanced relationship with more strategic partners collectively in the future.
According to another article, the National Sports Institute of Malaysia (ISN) and Futurise Sdn Bhd (Futurise) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) aimed at developing a regulatory framework within the sports market for sports technology and advancements that can potentially allow a new ecosystem to be established.
Futurise is a company under the Ministry of Finance that focuses on innovation, regulation and commercialisation. In collaboration with ISN, the company aims to ensure that there is a continuous effort in developing regulatory frameworks for sports be it the sports technological improvements, new guidelines or policy issues.
There is a huge prospect in the sports market that can be transformed into a potentially lucrative ecosystem in Malaysia, with technological advances, the Futurise CEO stated.
The MOU will see the two parties identify and explore potential collaboration towards building a sustainable business model and pilot innovative solutions within the sports technology space. While Futurise, through the National Regulatory Sandbox (NRS), will work on exploring innovation-friendly regulatory approaches for emerging solutions and business models developed by ISN partners and ecosystem participants, ISN will be looking towards providing expertise in the area of R&D with regards to sports technology and innovation. Currently, Futurise is in a preliminary discussion with one of ISN’s partners to address their regulatory issues.
The Futurise CEO concluded that the sports industry is incredibly diverse. Very shortly, the Malaysian sports market has the opportunity to be an ecosystem that will fuel new markets that attract investors looking to enter the sports investment landscape. The firm aims to contribute to the strengthening of technology innovation in sports for Malaysia and we look forward towards a fruitful partnership with ISN.
