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Public Health Matters

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Students Competing for Top Spot in Elite Health Technology Competition.

April 16, 2015
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Three SPH students are key members of a team competing for top honors in a contest to spark innovation in wearable medical technology.

Their entry in the Wearables in Healthcare Pilot Challenge uses low-cost wrist or chest bands that monitor patients’ heart rate and body temperature, warning clinicians when those readings exceed set thresholds. After a preliminary round of expert judging of 88 entries and a flurry of online voting, the Proxome team was selected as one of the top 10.

On April 23, the Proxome team will compete against other finalists in a live “pitch-off” at Google’s Cambridge offices to crown the Grand Prize winner. In “The Final Smackdown,” each team will have just 10 minutes to present its product and persuade a new panel of judges from the tech and medical fields.

Shauna Biggs, an MPH student studying global health and biostatistics, said the idea for the team’s device blossomed during the Stop Ebola Hackathon, a two-day event in December 2014 sponsored by CAMTech, the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The event combined engineers, designers, and tech entrepreneurs with doctors, nurses, and global health experts on the front lines of Ebola. There, the students met Adrian Gropper, a physician and tech entrepreneur who has founded several software-intensive medical device companies; Sean Doyle, a software engineer at MGH with experience creating medical software companies; and Jim Wright, an electrical engineer with a background in wearable devices.

Jessica Autrey, an MPH student studying global health and biostatistics , said the Proxome device was developed to work under the bulky—but life-saving—personal protective gear required by health care workers treating Ebola patients. Both the patient monitor and the beeper will be disinfected with an inexpensive bleach solution.

That nod to cost-effectiveness will reduce the overall long-term costs and could enable the device to be rolled out to more health care workers, Autrey said. That feature will likely be critical for ensuring wide adoption in resource-poor countries where many hospitals and clinics are already strapped for essential supplies.

The Proxome team walked away from the Hackathon with the Medtronic Foundation Prize for the most implementable innovation that specifically addressed Ebola treatment challenges in the field. The team’s third student, Kerlyne Jean, is an MPH/MBA candidate who will help the team keep its focus on the bottom line.

“Much of my work also focuses on finding the value that we can add in areas of the market,” Jean said. “We are extremely excited to be a part of the Wearables Challenge because we see our device making a huge impact globally.”

Gropper, in online forum conversations with judges, said nothing is thrown away after each user. The patient-worn beacons should cost $10-$20, depending on volume, can be easily disinfected between users, and should have a battery life of two years. The beepers are expected to cost about $50, and are also rechargeable and can be disinfected.

Said Autrey, “One of the best things about it, from a healthcare perspective, is that it could also be used for any infectious disease, not just Ebola.”

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