Students from the Department of Mechatronics Engineering at Mehran University of Engineering and Technology (MUET), Jamshoro, won the Special Award in Accessibility at the national final of the Alibaba Cloud AI Hackathon Pakistan 2026. The final was held on 24 October in Islamabad. The team received $1,000 and 500 Alibaba Cloud credits for its project, Saans. MUET congratulated the winners, their mentors, and faculty members and said the achievement reflects the university’s commitment to innovation and technology-driven solutions to social challenges. The post does not name the students or say how many teams took part in the accessibility category.
Saans is an English and Urdu, offline-first web application designed to help frontline healthcare workers screen children under five for tuberculosis (TB) using guidelines aligned with those of the World Health Organization (WHO). An offline-first design means that the application is built to work without a constant internet connection, which matters in places where connectivity is weak or unavailable. Frontline health workers often work in rural communities and low-resource clinics, and they may have no reliable data signal when they need to assess a child. Having the tool in both English and Urdu makes it more usable for workers with different language preferences. The university’s post does not say how the application reaches its screening results, whether it uses a machine learning model, or whether it has been tested with real patients or health workers.
TB in young children is an area where screening can be difficult. Symptoms such as persistent cough, fever, and weight loss overlap with those of other common childhood illnesses, and the disease is often missed or diagnosed late in small children. Pakistan is among the countries with the highest TB burden in the world, according to WHO, which is why tools that help health workers follow standard guidelines at the point of care attract attention. A software tool that guides a worker through the right questions and flags children who need referral cannot replace clinical diagnosis, but it may help ensure that children are not overlooked. How well Saans does this would need to be shown through testing and review by health professionals.
The hackathon was organised by Alkhidmat Foundation’s Bano Qabil programme with Alibaba Cloud under the theme AI for Pakistan’s Future, and teams from several universities placed in the national final. FAST-NUCES teams took the Grand Champion title and several track awards, while MUET’s win came through a special award for accessibility, which recognises projects that make technology or services easier for people to use. The prize of $1,000 and cloud credits gives the team resources to continue development, and the credits could be used to host the application or add features. MUET’s announcement does not say whether the team plans to pilot Saans with health authorities in Sindh or elsewhere, so the next steps for the project are not yet known.
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