Top innovators participating in MEDHA 2019 win a chance to acquire advanced training and fellowship to materialise their ideas
BETiC has collaborated with Haffkine Institute of Testing, Research and Training in Mumbai, Venture Centre in Pune and GH Raisoni College of Engineering in Nagpur to host MEDHA on separate weekends in July.
The cycle of innovation begins with medical problems proposed by doctors, and novel ideas generated by inter-disciplinary teams of innovators at MEDHA – Medical Device Hackathon. Participants watch curated videos of clinical problems and team up. Each team has doctors, designers and engineers (mechanical and electronics). They brainstorm, sketch and create innovative fabricated prototypes. All teams presenting working prototypes receive prizes. Top innovators win a chance to acquire advanced training and fellowship to materialise their ideas. Till date, eight MEDHAs have been conducted in various cities across Maharashtra.
Since 2014, the Biomedical Engineering and Technology incubation Centre (BETiC) at IIT Bombay, COE Pune and VNIT Nagpur have brought doctors and engineers together for low-cost medical innovation and impact.
“MEDHA brings together doctors who pose unmet needs and engineers who are keen to work in healthcare field. They work continuously over a weekend to create proof-of-concepts of novel medical devices for diagnosis or treatment. These ideas can be taken forward at various BETiC centres or other interested institutes to develop the products and take them to market through a startup company or licensing to industry. In the last four years, our team members have filed 50 patents and licensed 12 of them to startups or industry. Many of these ideas originated in MEDHA,” said Prof B Ravi, Founder, BETiC.