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2017
HEALTH HACK COMPETITION
Surgery & Recovery
We had a great time hosting the inaugural Health Hack Competition! The prototypes created by the 15 innovator teams were exceptional, and we are excited to see how all of you progress. We would like to thank all of our challenge champions for providing the unique challenges and guiding the innovators through the solution design process. We would also like to extent a big thank you to all volunteers, judges, and sponsors - all of which made this possible.
1st Place
Better IV Pole
Team IV Pole renamed Alaunis Medical Solutions was challenged by Dr. Sean McFadden, a surgeon in the Thoracic Department at Foothills hospital, to redesign an IV pole. The current model was creating issues for the nurses because of immense wire tangling and an inefficient user interface. The solution consists of three concepts: directionality, automation, and modularity. Directionality was applied to our design through the organization of the pole into a nurse and patient side thereby creating a focal point for the wires and tubes to be directed at the patient, and a clean user interface for the nurse with all the monitors facing one direction. Automating the design enabled the IV pole to sense the patient’s movement and automatically adjust/rotate the focal point of tubes towards the patient.
2nd Place
Wiring Wizards
Every single day operating tables become cluttered with tangled cables, frustrating the surgical team, delaying surgical times and putting expensive instruments at risk of falling out of the sterile field. In North America alone, there are approximately 10-12 million cases that use this equipment every year.
We have proposed a simple, affordable, and universal solution called the Calgary MagSleeve.
Our team of engineers, healthcare professionals, and scientists have designed an intuitive sterile sleeve system that not only bundles cables and cords together for easy organization, but also allows mounting of cables back to a magnetic bar under the drapes for safe storage of tools when they aren’t in use, protecting them from inadvertently falling out of the sterile field. By preventing the cable nest from ever forming during the procedure, the MagSleeve has the potential to drastically improve time efficiency, protect sterile tools and decrease frustrations for the surgical team
3rd Place
Christmas Tree Lock
Our team was challenged to find a better solution for securing catheters to Christmas tree adapters in Veterinary ORs.
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Drawing on our collective knowledge and expertise, we designed CathLock, a low-cost, intuitive, safe, and tool-less device that snaps on in under 5 seconds to securely fasten catheters to the adapters. As added benefits, CathLock is sterilisable, reusable, and mass-producible using low cost materials. Next steps for our team include working with our challenge sponsors in Veterinary Medicine to test and validate our design, evaluating the commercial potential of this device along with any medico-legal factors that need to be addressed, and laying some of the framework for a potential future business to bring a product to market.
People's Choice
Decoding Seizure Activity
Recently, novel 3D electrodes have been developed for detecting neural activity with high spatial and temporal resolution. These electrodes could predict a seizure before it happens. This team labelled preictal and interictal events, and then used machine learning to predict seizure events with 2-minute window.
