04/09/2018
Preview SensUs 2018
After months of hard work, SensUs 2018 is about to start! On 7 and 8 September, all 13 participating university teams will demonstrate their biosensor to the jury, in the hope to win one of the four prices. We will kick off the event on Friday with the testing event and on Saturday we have an open market. We close the weekend with the award ceremony, the winners of SensUs 2018 and the reveal of the SensUs 2019 theme.
This year's theme is ‘Measuring antibiotics for better healthcare”. Antibiotics have transformed medicine and saved millions of lives. Unfortunately, drug-resistant bacteria are appearing and this calls for more precise treatments, including optimal dosing of the drugs. Biosensors can rapidly and easily give feedback to patients and doctors. This is useful to personal dose the right amount of medication creating a more personal treatment. The teams have developed a biosensor for the last resort antibiotic vancomycin. A vancomycin biosensor will help to provide patient continue with the right dose, in order to increase the effectiveness and avoid side effects of drug treatment.
The jury has a key role in the SensUs competition, consisting of people from universities, companies, healthcare, and innovation organizations. They will criticize the teams on the analytical performance, creativity and the translational potential of the biosensor during Friday’s testing event. The analytical performance award goes to the team with the biosensor that functions best, in terms of measurement accuracy, speed, and required sample volume. The creativity award relates to the technological novelty of the biosensors and to the way how the teams have worked during their development process. The teams also followed an entrepreneurship training to focus on how to bring their biosensor on the market. This was very useful for the translation potential award, that is about the plans of the teams to bring their biosensor from a prototype to a product that can be used in society. Will the product meet the needs of doctors and patients, and will it be suited for industrial production?
The fourth price that can be won is the public inspiration award. This award gives recognition to the teams that best inspire the public. The award is based on the votes from the visitors and online viewers, who see the presentations, pitches and demonstrations of the teams. You can vote on your favourite team via SensUs Digital. This is an online platform that gives everybody, from any place in the world, the opportunity to be part of the SensUs experience. With this platform we proved an online experience similar to the physical attendance on the 7th and 8th of September. This is accomplished by providing a live streams, real-time data, Q&A and the opportunity to vote for your favourite team.
On Saturday an open market takes place with the teams pitching and explaining their biosensors. This year, SensUs organises also a brand new competition for high school students, the High Schools Project, to raise the awareness of biosensing even further. We hope to encourage young talents for technology and all the diversity it has to offer by creating a learning environment that stimulates students towards creativity and building real prototypes.
During the event, Amy Yewdall will be our Master of Ceremonies. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the TU/e. On Saturday, she will introduce our keynote speaker Shawna Butler. Shawna works as EntrepreNURSE in Residence at Reshape Innovation Center at Radboud University Medical Center and is part of the Exponential Medicine team at Singularity University. In her work she brings together the clinical, practical, and human sensibilities of a nurse to work with early-stage ventures, large-scale enterprises, and emerging and converging technologies. She will give an interesting lecture about “Precision, speed, and privacy - How does technology get us closer?”.
SensUs 2018 will be closed with the award ceremony awarding the winners for their achievements. We will introduce to you the theme of SensUs 2019 that the 14 participating teams will be working on for the upcoming year. We invite everyone to meet our network around biosensing to share ideas and experiences with students, companies, medical professionals and everyone who has interest in biosensing. We hope to see you all the 7th and 8th of September 2018!
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