A glimpse into the future of engineering and innovation
How can we harness artificial intelligence to help doctors make more accurate diagnoses under stressful conditions? What if the success rate of dieting could be increased with the help of a smartphone app that offers its users personalized, science-based nutrition plans? Does group running have the potential to become an inter-continental activity? These are just a few of the questions raised by teams of rising entrepreneurs in the auditorium of the Myhal Centre throughout Demo Day, before pitching their own innovative, tech-based solutions.
Nestled on the sixth floor of UofT’s Myhal Centre for Engineering and Entrepreneurship is the Hatchery—an incubator space that aims to foster student entrepreneurship by pairing students (at both the undergraduate and graduate levels) with experienced business mentors. Founded in 2012, the Hatchery was itself a startup that has now helped to launch over 80 student-led startups to this day. Each year, this four-month program unravels into Demo Day, where 14 finalist teams, chosen from over one hundred applicants, enthusiastically present their ideas and business models to a panel of judges composed of professors and alumni, as well as business specialists, CEOs, and lawyers. These teams compete for four prizes that amount to a total of $45,000 dollars–seed money to bring their prototype into the market.
Among the finalist groups, a good number chose to tackle current issues in healthcare and wellness. For instance, patients coming into hospitals’ emergency rooms (ERs) with seizures or head trauma often receive a wrong initial diagnosis, due to the complexity of brain disorders. ER misdiagnosis affects around 22 million people annually in North America alone, and can potentially result in years of mistreatment and severely decrease a person’s quality of life. Team Brainloop, in collaboration with neurologists at the University Health Network, devised an intelligent preliminary diagnosis tool to assist physicians in the ER: by feeding a patient’s medical history, symptoms, and clinical test results into Brainloop’s algorithm, physicians can now generate a diagnosis faster and with 95 percent accuracy, reducing the misdiagnosis rate by about 15 percent.
A few presentations later, Team Alium introduces the Alium mobile app, or “the nutritionist in your pocket”. From Paleo to the trendy Keto diet, a growing number of millennials are experimenting with different diets, but rarely have access to a nutritionist’s advice. This is a gap that the team’s novel app could bridge: by tracking users’ eating habits through quickly snapped pictures, the algorithm can generate personalized diet suggestions based on lifestyle, health conditions, food restrictions, and even taste preferences. Plus, users can chat with Alium’s sympathetic and highly sophisticated dietician bot, Eve.
Also leveraging the convenience and popularity of smartphone apps is Team OpenRace, who set out with the goal of encouraging physical exercise among young adults. The team has made group runs (such as marathons or races) more fun and accessible to busy, budget-conscious students. The OpenRace mobile platform enables runners all over the world to connect and invite one another via the app. They can then agree on how many kilometers to run, and virtually “race” against each other while being in entirely different cities or even on different continents!
Many other ingenious prototypes were pitched that afternoon. While highly diverse, most ideas are connected by underlying patterns that hint at the future course of entrepreneurship and engineering: big data and machine learning (which go hand-in-hand), personalized service, and the mobilization of the vast networks enabled by social media. These future entrepreneurs also seem to be aware of millennials’ particular fondness for convenient and user-friendly experiences which, at the same time, allow them to foster global and personal connections.
After a brief networking break over delicious hors d’oeuvres, the evening closed off with the announcement of the winning teams. The grand prize of $20,000 went to Team Aeroflux, who already filed a patent for their magnetic field-based, contact-free brake for planes that promises to revolutionize the aircraft industry. Follow-up prizes of $10,000 were allotted to Sparrow, an AI gaming coach for competitive gamers, and Examify, a software that helps professors and TAs create exams more easily and efficiently––it is the first of its kind. Finally, the Orozco award (named after the Hatchery’s executive director) of $2,500 goes to Team Brainloop, as determined by an audience vote.
Although no one can predict what the future holds, these teams certainly contribute to sketching its blueprint through their amazing talent.
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