43 members of The University of Queensland community participated in the 2021 UQIES Weekend of Startups hosted by UQIES (UQ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Society) and EWH (Engineering World Health) in partnership with UQ Ventures. Participants included current UQ students, alumni and staff.
UQIES’ flagship event, Weekend of Startups has finally made a comeback in-person after 2 years! The 2021 UQIES Weekend of Startups challenged all participants to ideate a solution to the world’s health and wellbeing challenges, then validate and build a minimum viable product (MVP) during the weekend (8-10 October). The event concluded with a pitch from all nine participating teams in front of a panel of judges. The nine teams proposed a range of innovative and practicable startup ideas to improve health and wellbeing around the globe. Their startup ideas ranged from helping students organise time to nap on public transport to making clean cooking accessible in developing countries.
The winning team, WoundMetrics, is an online platform aimed to help patients with chronic wounds or those recovering from surgery by monitoring their open wounds to ensure easy communication with their primary care doctors and nurses remotely.
Javan McGuckin, a member of WoundMetrics team shared the benefits of the technology.
“This service would bring value to regional residents, aged populations, and people in lockdowns who could not easily get into doctors regularly. We also proposed future features to apply image recognition to the wound imaging to provide feedback to patients if the healing progression was on track.”
I was glad to hear the feedback from the participants after the event. All participants that I talked with after the event, said they really enjoyed this opportunity to learn more about startups and meet like-minded people. Thien Bui, another team member of WoundMetrics shared his experience.
"It was a great time, (I) made friends and learnt a lot."
The 2021 UQIES Weekend of Startups winners:
- 1st place $2500
WoundMetrics - accessible and remote wound aftercare, and using AI to review open wounds and thus detect healing progression and infection
- 2nd place $1500
Mindy's World- gamified young adult education on drugs and alcohol
- 3rd place $750
Snap - supercharging your sleep; facilitating sleeping on public transport
- Global Impact Award $300
Clean Cooking - supporting clean and sustainable cooking for developing regions