Innovation Winners

Four senior bioengineering students put what they have learned about technology and business into action, earning the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Coulter College for Healthcare Innovation competition.

Michael Ikefuna, Brady Killham, Juan Ramirez, and Jeannette Santos earned Best Overall for their plan to develop FibGuard, a wearable, noninvasive atrial fibrillation early-detection device.

Twelve universities are selected each year to take part in the competition. The UTA team, along with faculty advisors Jun Liao, professor, and Justyn Jaworski, assistant professor, also presented their winning project at the BMES annual conference in October.

UTA competed against teams from Vanderbilt, Purdue, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest, Texas A&M, the University of Oklahoma and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, among others. Previous winners include teams from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Florida, and Boston University. BMES hosted the competition in partnership with Medtronic and The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation so students could learn and engage with professionals, expand their networks, and foster collaborations with fellow students who share similar interests.

The mentors were a valuable resource throughout, according to Ramirez.

“There were a lot of components to this competition from design and business perspectives,” he says. “Telling us that our original idea wasn’t good really helped us because we found something that separated us from our competition. Once we found that subset, things really fell into place, and our mentors started getting more and more excited.”