Interview: Aldrei Ong, James Dyson Award 2026 Sustainability Winner

I was inspired to enter the James Dyson Award by previous winners from De La Salle University. In fact, while I was working on my master’s thesis, I met Joseph Aristotle De Leon (2024 Philippines National Winner) in one of our university labs, before he went on to win the Award himself. Seeing someone from the same university take an idea that far made me wonder whether Sentinel could have a life beyond my own research.

Becoming the Global Sustainability Winner of the James Dyson Award is an extraordinary way to begin my career and I am deeply grateful to the James Dyson Foundation for giving me this global recognition. Developing Sentinel has involved a lot of doubt, frustration and failure, particularly when I was trying to turn an idea that was clear in my head into something others could see and understand. But I kept going, and there is something incredibly rewarding about taking an idea and making it something tangible, piece by piece.

It feels surreal to have won this award and I’d love for my journey to encourage other young engineers to take their own ideas seriously, just as previous James Dyson Award winners inspired me.

Sentinel is a building damage sensor designed to detect cracks in concrete remotely. It transforms concrete spacer blocks, which are already used in construction to hold steel reinforcement in place, into smart sensors by adding conductive materials such as graphene and carbon fibre. These materials create electrical pathways through the concrete. When cracks or damage occur, those pathways are disrupted, causing measurable changes in electrical resistance. Sentinel uses these changes to indicate damage, allowing the condition of a structure to be monitored remotely.

Buildings have smoke detectors, fire alarms and CCTV, yet there is no equivalent for monitoring structural safety. After an earthquake, engineers often need to inspect buildings in person to determine whether they are safe. When thousands of buildings are affected at once, there may simply not be enough qualified engineers to assess them all quickly.

I saw this first-hand after the earthquake in General Santos City, when some buildings remained closed until structural investigations could be completed. That meant significant time and cost for building owners, lost productivity and, most importantly, uncertainty for people waiting to find out whether it was safe to return.

I wanted to find a way to make that assessment faster, more affordable and scalable, by building a sensor into the concrete itself. That idea became Sentinel.

Sentinel has been designed with affordability in mind, making it easier to install at scale. Because it transforms a component already used in reinforced concrete construction, Sentinel can be incorporated into buildings as they are built without adding a separate structural element.

I’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response to Sentinel since entering it into the James Dyson Award, and I hope the Award will open doors and help me take it to the next stage.

The immediate priority is moving towards field validation. Sentinel spacer blocks are already embedded in a building in the Philippines, so I want to monitor them over time and compare their readings with actual damage to understand how reliably those signals can indicate structural damage. I also want to work with electronics engineers to refine the design, making Sentinel smaller, more reliable and easier to manufacture at scale.

Ultimately, the goal is to develop Sentinel to the point where it becomes commercially viable. My ambition is for structural monitoring to become as commonplace as smoke detectors and fire alarms, with sensors like Sentinel built into buildings from the start.