7 Award-Winning AI Projects from Best Innovative Minds 2025: Healthcare to Accessibility Innovation
Best Innovative Minds (BIM) is ASSIST Software's annual internal innovation competition, where development teams spend several months transforming ambitious ideas into production-ready AI-powered prototypes. Unlike typical hackathons, BIM provides sustained support with ongoing feedback from industry experts, mentorship, and resources to build fully functional solutions with clear paths to market deployment.
Innovation emerges when talented teams tackle genuine problems with cutting-edge technology and creative thinking. At ASSIST Software, our annual Best Innovative Minds competition creates the space for this kind of breakthrough work.
This year's edition brought together developers, designers, and engineers who spent months transforming ambitious ideas into working solutions. The ASSIST Software team once again demonstrated that innovation stems from passion, research, and collaboration. The seven finalist projects showcased ingenuity across diverse fields, including health, education, automotive engineering, cybersecurity, and solutions for people with disabilities.
Here's what emerged from months of late-night coding, iterative design, and relentless problem-solving.
Best Innovative Minds 2025: From Concept Development to Market-Ready Solutions
Starting in September 2025, teams submitted their concepts and entered an intensive development phase. Unlike traditional hackathons, BIM provides sustained support over several months. Participants receive continuous feedback from industry experts, refine their solutions iteratively, and build production-ready prototypes.
The evaluation process brought together members of the academic community, business partners, and ASSIST Software representatives. Projects were presented as functional AI-powered prototypes and assessed against clearly defined criteria, including technical innovation, real-world applicability, and market potential.
By February 2026, the final presentations showcased fully functional solutions with clear paths toward market deployment. The competition recognized both technical excellence and practical viability, awarding prizes totaling approximately €5,000 and creating opportunities for further development beyond the event itself.
The Winning AI Projects
First Place & People's Choice Awards: RaceBox AI – Real-Time Remote Vehicle Tracking
Team members: Ionut Mindrescu, Bogdan Otrocol, Iulian Lavric
The Problem: Racing pilots need to monitor their vehicles remotely to avoid damaging engines and other systems during competition, but lack tools that provide real-time diagnostics and AI-powered insights for both competitive and daily driving.
The Solution: RaceBox AI is a ready-to-use hardware and software system built from scratch that detects errors, monitors live vehicle parameters, and interprets data with AI for both competition cars and regular vehicles, enabling remote diagnostics and DIY repairs.
Technologies:
- KiCad: Schematic and PCB development
- ESPNOW: Real-time communication with widgets
- C++: Hardware device firmware
- React & Laravel: Web application
Key Features:
- Real-time remote telematics from the vehicle
- Plug-and-play device via OBDII port, ready to use
- Ability to pair the main device with custom-built widgets to extend features (display, GPS, accelerometer, etc.)
AI integration for remote vehicle DTC diagnosis
Impact on Industry: This product started as a device for pilots but expanded to users across multiple domains for remote diagnostics and fleet tracking. The team received feedback from their first clients and prepared to release the new version.
Team Perspective:
"A team of three people sharing the same passion for cars and technology managed, with minimal resources, to bring a revolutionary product to the market. Since its launch, it has already seen high demand across various industries. Creating a product that you know will bring change to a specific field is a source of indescribable satisfaction." - Ionut Mindrescu
RaceBox AI's dual recognition, winning both First Place and the People's Choice Award, demonstrates that the solution resonates with both expert evaluators and the broader ASSIST Software community.
You can find more details about this project here.
Second Place: PerAware – AI-Powered Cybersecurity Training Platform
Team members: Magdalena Isan, Cristi Vrabie, Victor Balan, Iulia Mitu, Vasile Bordei (consultant: Raluca Cohal)
The Problem: Security breaches increasingly succeed by manipulating people rather than breaking encryption, yet cybersecurity training remains generic. Everyone receives the same content regardless of their individual psychological vulnerabilities, which determine actual risk. By 2025, cybercrime had grown into the third-largest economy in the world, with breaches becoming more frequent and financial losses mounting.
The Solution: PerAware empowers organizations to understand the personality traits and behaviors that make individuals vulnerable to social engineering. Through a comprehensive assessment, it provides targeted training recommendations to mitigate these risks effectively. Leveraging psychological diagnosis, AI, and behavioral science, PerAware adapts to each person's personality, knowledge, and behavior, guiding them confidently on their journey to act safely in a cyber world where social engineering is the norm.
Technologies:
- Full-Stack Framework: Java 21 Spring Boot 4 Backend, Next.js 16 Frontend, Python for RAG system integration
- Modular Architecture: Spring Modulith for scalable domain-driven design
- Interactive Visualization: Recharts & Radar models for behavioral analytics
- RAG Engine: Python (FastAPI/LangChain) for context retrieval
- LLM Integration: Leverages LLMs for personalized lessons
Key Features:
- AI-Personalized Learning: Generates tailored training paths based on personality profiles, behavioral assessments, learning style, and knowledge gaps
- Behavioral Assessment: Calculates vulnerability and growth area scores for comprehensive analysis
- Global Analytics: Visualizes organization-wide statistics and key improvement metrics
- RAG Integration: Enhances training content using industry-leading cybersecurity knowledge bases and real-world situations
Impact on Industry: As technical defenses improve, attackers increasingly exploit human psychology. PerAware addresses this by transforming generic compliance training into behavioral change programs that reduce organizational security risk where it matters most: human decision-making under manipulation. Training must evolve to empower and protect users wherever they are by adapting to their personalities, knowledge, and behavior.
Target Users: Companies protecting employees from targeted attacks, families and individuals securing personal digital lives, teenagers and seniors with different vulnerability profiles, and public figures and executives facing sophisticated threats.
