A competition between University of Pennsylvania mobile app teams, many with medical degrees, produced medical apps spanning eye tests for toddlers and adults and a Google Glass application for people recovering from strokes, which affect 900,000 people each year. Five medical teams were among the five finalists who were paired with a software company to bring together their vision for their apps. They will show off their finished product in a competition for a $50,000 investment from Ben Franklin Technology Partner of Southeast Pennsylvania set for April.
The AppItUp Challenge is only in its second year but it received 427 submissions, most of them from the Wharton School of Business. But only one submission from the school made it to the semifinals. About 46 teams from the Perelman School of Medicine submitted applications and seven made it to the semifinals.
A group of software companies picked the teams they want to work with.
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StrokeVision by Dr. Claude Nguyen, an assistant professor of clinical neurology at the medical school and the director of stroke services at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center developed an app for Google Glass to assist patients with rehabilitation, mainly from strokes. It combines elements of gamification and physical therapy. But an essential part of the exercises is the user is moving around so doctors can assess gait and speed. Undeterred by the recent news casting doubt on Google Glass’ long-term survival, Nguyen pointed out that it could also work with one of the Google Glass clone companies that have emerged. It is assembling its app with Skyless Game Solutions.
Vision testing with OKN An app to help parents do a vision test for infants and toddlers uses moving screen patterns to assess things like preferential looking, ability to fixate and follow an object and other abilities. The goal of the app will be to assess unconscious responses in the child’s eyes to alert parents to eye problems earlier. The team includes Dr. Shivani Sethi and Monte Mills, a clinical ophthalmology professor at Penn and director of pediatric ophthalmology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Kanda Software is helping the team produce its app.
MobileOptx One of the groups in the competition is already a company that’s part of the UpStart incubator within the Center for Innovation at Penn. Dr. Jason Brant, an otolaryngologist and faculty instructor at the Perelman School of Medicine and Dr. Natasha Mirza developed a way to attach the smartphones to endoscopes to give physicians more mobility when they use these medical devices. Now it wants to develop an app interface, and customize the devices with voice activation and apply it to telemedicine. I wrote about the company earlier this year. The company is working on its app with Sempercon.
PathwayRx Dr. Kathleen Lee, a resident at Penn Hospital, devised a decision-making tool to map out clinical pathways for medical treatment using shared workflows and patient-specific checklists. It will work with Tangled Web Communications to develop its app concept.
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Live Directory Benjamin Ranard, a grad Student at the Medical School, wanted to create a way to help healthcare workers to find out whether the people they are trying to reach are physically at the hospital. Renard will work with Wodify to develop the app.
Some of the other interesting presentations among the semi-finalist medical teams included:
Eye Click-You See — Dr. Sonul Mehta, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the medical school developed a concept for an app that calculates a person’s refraction for glasses. It also takes measurements for the intraocular lens for cataract surgery.
AerO2Max A team led by Hansell Stedman, an associate professor at the Perelman School of Medicine, is working on a concept for an app that connects to a sensor to monitor oxygen levels in the blood while exercising. Stedman said he sees the potential for its technology to provide a more accurate assessment of health than a heart monitor and plans to add other measures to gauge respiratory function.
[Photo credit: First Aid smartphone from BigStock Photos]
Update: This story was updated to add the software companies each team is developing an app with and to correct an error: EyeClick You See was mistakenly identified as a finalist. The finalists not named in the earlier version of this story are Live Directory and PathwayRx.
