Students Win Prize in HealthHacks RI Competition

This past weekend a team from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth consisting of Electrical Engineer Md Shaad Mahmud (a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department), Bioengineer Erika Naumann Gaillat (A Master student in Bioengineering Department), and Computer Engineer Esfar Turzo (A Master student in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department), attended the HealthHacks RI competition, which took place in the University of Rhode Island. A total of 36 participants from URI, WPI, Harvard, Brown and UMass Dartmouth attended this competition. The main subject of this competition was “Internet-of-Things for Aging Population.” This overall theme helped expose the growing need for new technology for the increasing population of the elderly.

As of now every 11 seconds an elderly person needs to be treated in the Emergency Room (ER) for a fall and the falls account for 40% of all injury deaths. To address this massive problem, this engineering group tried to design a system prototype called “ProGlass”. The objective of ProGlass was to, “Create an innovative and cost effective approach for the detection of falls in the aging population.” Therefore, ProGlass was designed to be lightweight, easy to use, and have a good price compared to other biomedical devices in the market that help detect falls in patients. The team members presented their design of ProGlass successfully and won a prize ($500) for their innovative ideas and the marketability of their device.

Md Shaad Mahmud joined UMass Dartmouth in fall 2014 and has been a research assistant for the NSF project titled “Design of a wearable biosensor system with wireless network for the remote detection of life threatening events in neonates” (award# 1401711).  Shaad has published several research papers in the area of wearable sensors under the project.  He also won the 2015 year's overall global startup battle (GSB) Champion in the Co Innovator's Track with other team members, among thousands of teams from events where over 25,000 entrepreneurs attended across 60 countries. He had a summer research internship from Computational Science and Data Science lab at UMass medical School. Esfar Turzo was also supported by the same NSF grant and has completed his master thesis titled “Cloud Based Wireless Health and Its Application of Sleep Monitoring” last month (September, 2017). Erika Naumann Gaillat is a master student in bioengineering department.