A smart patch that can measure movement patterns in Parkinson's disease was awarded the first place in DTU Skylab's Open Innovation X final.
Three minutes to pitch the idea and four minutes of questions from a judge panel. Such were the conditions for 83 students who participated in DTU Skylab's Open Innovation X final with 200 invited external guests and students. The winning team, 'Lundtech', received DKK 30.000 for a prototype on a high-tech patch that with built-in sensors can measure motion abnormalities in patients with Parkinson's disease.
"The project won because Lundbeck, who had posed the challenge, were excited about the solution. It was simple, the students had thought all the way around the product, and they distinguished themselves from the others because they had made a prototype that showed that it could be done. It's a really nice result after a week's work, "says Professor Jakob E. Bardram from DTU Compute and Director of the Copenhagen Center for Health Technology - CACHET, who chaired the judge committee.
Nikolai Eskild Jensen, who studies at DTU's Process & Innovation study line, participated in the winning Lundtech team and was proud to be in the first place.
"We have participated because we like to construct something that works. It has been hard and we have slept too little, but we have learned a lot of the process because we have worked across fields like mathematics, medicine and process design. And then it's very much a matter of working with a real life case", says Nikolai Eskild Jensen.
Second prize for digital network
In addition to Lundtech patch, the second place was of DKK 20.000 awarded to three students from DTU and CBS, who had developed a digital network to map strong research environments for Novo Nordisk. The system was based on information about scientific publications from among others Pubmed and Scopus. In addition, the IDA Health Technology prize of DKK 10.000 went to an app designed to use existing data on smartphones to provide health advice, and finally the best pitch was awarded a special prize of DKK 10.000.
This year's challenges in Open Innovation X were posed by Tryg Forsikring Danmark, Lundbeck and Novo Nordisk. All challenges were within healthcare, where the students have worked with their solutions in an innovation sprint format organised and facilitated by DTU Skylab. Prior to the finals, a total of 19 teams participated in a developer weekend where they were given the opportunity to work closely with the companies that have put together the four challenges of the year. Read about the cases in the info box.
The finals in Open Innovation X was the culmination of the Oi-X in the spring semester. Participating groups can now choose to continue their project in an incubation process supported by DTU Skylab and in collaboration with the companies that have posed the challenge. In October, Oi-X's autumn will feature a theme on sustainability and the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Read all the 18 submitted solutions by the student teams here.
News story originally written in Danish by Peter Aagaard Brixen and posted here.
Photo by Kaare Smith.