IGHI Student Challenges Competition: Enter the Dragon's Den
Six Imperial finalists competed to win funding towards their global health research project
The Institute of Global Health Innovation’s (IGHI) annual Student Challenges Competition was brought to a close last Monday during our Dragon’s Den event to find the winner. The competition, which is now in its third year, provides a platform for Imperial students to showcase their global health research idea and to win prize money to help develop it further.
PhD students Christopher Payne and Hani Marcus impressed the Dragons the most and scooped the top prize money of £5,000. Their inspiring and inventive idea was for a smart handheld instrument for microsurgery that alerts neurosurgeons if they are at risk of damaging tissue they are handling. We all make mistakes, whether it’s a typo, a miscommunication or a glitch, but for neurosurgeons, the impact of a mistake can lead to a life or death situation. Christopher and Hani’s device works by indicating to surgeons, via vibrotactile feedback, when a force threshold has been exceeded, allowing the surgeon to adjust the amount of pressure they are exerting to avoid damaging the tissue. Many existing haptic-feedback systems, particularly master-slave robotic platforms, are large, extremely complex, and costly. However, their approach is small, simple, and inexpensive, so it can be scaled up quite easily.
“We are absolutely delighted to have won the IGHI Student Challenges Competition” said Christopher and Hani. “We are both very grateful to have had the opportunity to showcase our work; the prize money will be a huge help in enabling us to take the project forwards”.
Other entries covered a range of topics, including sixth year Medicine student Jing Ouyang’s idea for an online magazine for grassroots discussion in global health, Innovation Design Engineering student Vidhi Mehta, who presented her idea for an International Laboratory for the identification of antibacterial drugs and Ethan Tan, a Finance and Accounting student who told us about how we can use biotechnology to transform slum areas into self-sustaining eco-cities.
Watch the full video recording of the event below:
More photos of the event can be found on our Flickr pages here
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