THE “UBORA” DESIGN COMPETITION: AN INTERNATIONAL STUDENT CHALLENGE FOCUSED ON INNOVATIVE MEDICAL DEVICES DEVELOPED USING THE “CDIO” METHODOLOGY

Abstract

UBORA is an educational and design online platform or infrastructure aimed at the collaborative development of open-source medical devices (OSMD) to address current and future global healthcare challenges. It pretends to support the healthcare professionals and the medical industry with new methods for creation of innovative solutions that take into account needs, safety, feasibility, efficacy and performance. To support the implementation and testing of the UBORA e-infrastructure and to promote the future impact of OSMD, teaching-learning actuations play a fundamental role. In consequence, in parallel to the implementation of the mentioned infrastructure, a set of international design competitions and schools are being developed. In this study we present the results from the “First UBORA Design Competition”.

This “First UBORA Design Competition” counted with a total of 113 submitted projects, from which 60 were selected for a second round. After such second round, 26 especially relevant projects and their teams, which lived in many cases a complete CDIO experience, have been assessed and chosen as finalists. Among presented projects and solutions we can cite: medical devices for detecting or preventing malaria, portable vaccine coolers, systems for the sterilization of medical and instruments, incubators for newborns, devices for monitoring pregnancy, breast pumps with cooling and preservation systems, 4D printed ergonomic supports, polymeric devices for treating articular pathologies and CPAP devices for babies, to mention just a few examples. Most of the finalist teams have reached the prototyping and testing stage, following the recommendations provided by the organizers of the competition and by the participating mentors, in order to better answer the questions from the two-stage evaluation sheets, which serve as a sort of “lean canvas” or creativity promotion templates to guide the development process. The first stage of the competition mainly covered the conceptual stage and the second stage focused on the design, implementation and operation of the obtained prototypes. The international magnitude of the competition can be appreciated by taking into account that teams from 15 universities and 12 countries from Europe and Africa took part in this first edition. Main benefits, lessons learned and future challenges, linked to these international medical device design competitions, are analyzed, taking account of the available results from this first implementation during 2017, so as to improve towards the future editions.