Photo: T. Kaare Smith

High-tech patch wins innovation competition

Medicine and medico technology Medical equipment and systems

A patch which can measure movement patterns in persons with Parkinson’s disease won DTU’s Open Innovation X final.

Three minutes to pitch the idea to a jury panel followed by a short round of questions Those were the conditions for 83 students who Tuesday participated in the Open Innovation X final at DTU Skylab with 200 attending external guests and students.

The winning team—‘Lundtech’—received EUR 4,100 (DKK 30,000) for a prototype for a high-tech patch which can measure movement abnormalities in patients with Parkinson’s disease using built-in sensors.

“The project won because Lundbeck—which had posed the challenge—loved the solution. It was simple, the students had thought the product through in all details, and they also stood out in relation to the others because they had made a prototype, which showed it could be done. It’s a really impressive result after just over a week’s work,” says Professor Jakob E. Bardram from DTU Compute and Director of the Copenhagen Center for Health Technology, who was president of the jury.

Nikolai Eskild Jensen—who is a student on DTU’s BEng programme Process and Innovation—was part of the winning Lundtech team and was proud of having clinched the first place.

“We’ve participated because we like designing something that works. It has been hard, and we’ve slept too little, but we’ve learnt a lot from the process, because we’ve worked across academic fields like mathematics, medicine, and process and design. And it gives you a lot to work with a challenge from real life,” says Nikolai Eskild Jensen.

Second prize to digital network
After the Lundtech patch, the runners-up prize of EUR 2,700 went to three students from DTU and CBS, who had developed a digital network for mapping strong research environments for Novo Nordisk. The system was based on information about scientific publications from—among other sources—Pubmed and Scopus.

The challenges in this year’s Open Innovation X were posed by Tryg Forsikring Danmark, Lundbeck, and Novo Nordisk. All the challenges were in this year’s digital health theme, under which the students have worked with their solutions in an innovation sprint format organized and facilitated by DTU Skylab.

Prior to the finals, a total of 19 teams participated in a developer weekend, in which they had the opportunity to work closely with the companies which posed the four challenges for this year’s theme:

• Help us design a proactive approach to innovative partnerships. Who are the key players and where are the networks in relevant research? (Novo Nordisk)
• We share—my care. How do we ensure a healthy and active life for senior citizens with crowdfunded or peer-to-peer insurance? (Tryg)
• How do you assess movement abnormalities in patients with Parkinson’s disease by means of technologies that can be used in the patients’ everyday life? (Lundbeck)
• How do you give advice on personal treatment and lifestyle counselling based on passive data flows from mobile devices? (Novo Nordisk)

The Open Innovation X final was the culmination of the Oi-X course in the spring semester. The participating teams can now choose to continue the work on their projects in an incubation course—possibly in cooperation with the companies that posed the challenge. Sustainability and the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals will be the theme for the Oi-X held in October in the autumn semester.