STEI Students Participated in the IZZIPACK Team, and Won The Awards in South Korea

Two ITB students, Marchio Kevin Abdul Azis ( Electrical Engineering 2015) and Intan Nur Amanah (Product Design 2015), made achievements with the team from Chonbuk National University Korea, at the 2019 Global Capstone Design Fair: Engineering Education Festival (E2Festa), at the end Last November. In this event, both of them won the Excellence Award Winner or equivalent to the title of Runner Up. Other team members are Kim Ju Young Ko (Chonbuk National University, Mechanical Engineering), Jeong Gon Lee (Chonbuk National University, Mechanical Engineering), and Ga Young (Chonbuk National University, Industrial Design)

One of the team members, Marchio, revealed that his team was a delegation team from the Chonbuk National University Hub of Innovation and his team was chosen to be one of the delegates because they had won the Grand Prize Award at the previous competition, namely the International Student Joint Capstone Design Project (i-CAPS) 2019 in Daejeon, South Korea, August 2019.

“At the beginning we participated in this competition, you could say we have started long preparations for this competition since January 2019 when we first participated in i-CAPS 2019, which is a similar competition too,” said Marchio.

According to him, this competition is a technology-based innovation product design competition. The difference lies in the multi-disciplinary and multi-national aspects, where each team that is joined comes from a different study program, and the participants come from different countries. For example, his team consisting of Indonesians and South Koreans. In the competition, Marchio’s team created an anti-pickpocket backpack based on electromechanical technology, which was named IZZIPACK. This is motivated by the issue of security of valuables when users take public transportation, such as on buses / trains / MRT, especially during rush hour.

Based on research that has been conducted by the team, it is revealed that cases of stealthy pickpocketing are more likely and often occur in jostling passengers than forced pickpockets. For this reason, a backpack that has a zipper lock system, so that only the owner of the backpack can open the backpack, by  tapping  the RFID card / bracelet.

“We also raised the issue that the anti-pickpocket bags that are widely circulating in the market generally only prioritize safety, so generally these bags have very poor accessibility. For this reason, the zipper lock system that we created is designed in such a way that IZZIPACK has excellent accessibility. IZZIPACK is also integrated with a smartphone application to monitor remaining battery, activate an alarm system, and track lost / stolen bags with a GPS tracker, ”he explained.

Even though they have won the award, Marchio admitted that his team also faced quite a lot of technical problems. According to him, the technology made by his team is indeed original, so there must be a lot of  trial and error  when implemented. In addition, his team also had quite a hard time integrating all the electrical and mechanical components in the bag, which  incidentally is made of soft cloth. So the technology must be sturdy, waterproof, shock resistant, but the bag must also be elastic and lightweight.

“However, the biggest challenge for this competition is on the multidisciplinary and multi-national side. We have to adapt to long-term teamwork with team members from different majors and perspectives, and especially with our 3 team members who come from South Korea, which of course have many barriers of view, language and time, “he concluded.