A team of four students, two each from Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kasturba Medical College (KMC), won the first prize in ‘Hackabout 2016’ and a cash award of Rs. 1 lakh in the competition to design and prototype a solution to identified medical problems.
According to a press release issued by the Manipal University here on Tuesday, the competition was organised by Philips and Manipal University for students of KMC and MIT. The runners-up were a team of four from MIT. They walked away with a purse of Rs. 75,000. The prize distribution function was held at the MIT Library Auditorium on Monday.
The winning team comprised Shikhar Srivastava and Reuben John of MIT and Sidharth R. and Siddharth Pratap Nene of KMC. The team worked on the theme, ‘Evaluation of causative factors for amlodipine-induced pedal edema’.
The runners-up team consisted of Abhishek Karan, Elvis Louis D’Souza, Shreyas Hebbar, Malvika Sandhu and Raghav Chawla. Their theme was, ‘Role of metabolic obesity and BMI in patients with coronary artery disease’.
A total of 49 teams took part and each team was allowed to have up to five students. “The competition was unique, interesting, and very exciting too,” said the participants.
The problems were defined by KMC as the themes were on health care and the platform to solve them came from Philips. “This was a great opportunity for the participants to get a first-hand experience to work on the Philips Data Science Platform with real world data solving real life clinical problems,” said Mr. Srinivas Prasad, CEO, Philips Innovation Campus, Bengaluru, who was the chief guest of the function.
‘Work together’
H. Vinod Bhat, Vice-Chancellor of Manipal University, said that this was a good opportunity for students from different institutions to work together.
“It is more of a collaboration than competition. The students have jointly addressed problems that impact lives. India as a country is doing well in health care but needs to do more, particularly with emerging problems,” Mr. Bhat said. “Simple innovations can make big changes in people’s lives,” he said in reference to the competition.
