ATxSummit 2026 opens with youth AI projects and healthcare partnerships

ATxSummit 2026 opened in Singapore on 19 May with a focus on practical AI use for public and social good, led by youth-led projects from across ASEAN and new healthcare collaborations involving SingHealth.

The summit began with an Opening Gala Dinner at Gardens by the Bay, with Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam attending as Guest-of-Honour. This year’s ATxSummit brings together government leaders from Asia, the Middle East and the United States, alongside international organisations, industry executives and academic figures in AI.

ASEAN youth projects put AI into applied settings

The opening dinner featured 11 projects from the inaugural AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge, selected from more than 600 team submissions across all ASEAN Member States. The projects covered healthcare, education, social inclusion and agriculture, with the shared aim of using AI to improve lives and strengthen communities.

President Tharman presented the top three prizes to teams from Brunei, Cambodia and Myanmar. Brunei’s ΣHAI won the overall prize for an AI-powered dementia care platform that uses speech, language and video analysis to support earlier detection of cognitive decline, personalised caregiver guidance and better dementia care coordination across ASEAN communities.

Cambodia’s Voha.ai placed second with a tool designed to help hearing-impaired children improve pronunciation through real-time speech recognition and visual mouth-tracking technology. Myanmar’s Future Flux placed third with an offline AI education platform powered by edge computing, aimed at rural students in areas with limited internet connectivity.

The winning teams received cash prizes of US$5,000, US$3,000 and US$1,000 respectively.

Koo Sengmeng, Director of Talent & Ecosystem at AI Singapore, said, “This is the kind of impact we hope to see from our AI Ready ASEAN effort – our future generations not just knowing how AI works, but knowing where it matters, where it should be used, and how it can improve lives.”

The AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge is organised by AI Singapore in partnership with the ASEAN Foundation, with support from Google.org and in collaboration with the Infocomm Media Development Authority. It forms part of the AI Ready ASEAN initiative, which aims to equip 5.5 million people with foundational AI literacy and capabilities.

Healthcare partnerships target clinical AI deployment

Two Memoranda of Understanding were also signed earlier in the day at the SingHealth AI in Health Symposium, a pre-event of ATxSummit 2026 held at Capella, Singapore.

SingHealth and the Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology, Royal University of Bhutan, agreed to work on initiatives that promote responsible AI use in healthcare, with a focus on localised solutions for emerging healthcare systems.

The collaboration centres on an AI-assisted Chest Radiograph model powered by MerMED-FM, a multimodal, multi-specialty medical imaging foundation model developed through a collaboration between SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medicine Centre and A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing.

The model, published in The Lancet Digital Health, has demonstrated good performance in detecting pneumonia, tuberculosis, hepatic masses and colorectal cancer. It will be trained on Bhutanese data, the model is expected to roll out in 2027 across Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City Healthcare Hospitals.

Singapore General Hospital also signed an MoU with A*STAR’s Diagnostics Development Hub to accelerate AI-enabled and multimodal precision diagnostics into market-ready solutions. The partnership will focus on commercially scalable diagnostic tools, including those for antimicrobial resistance infections and early memory loss in seniors.