Skip to main content

Industry

Industry involvement

Engineering Innovation in Health (EIH) develops technical solutions to pressing challenges in health. We welcome projects from your company that will benefit from a collaborative working team of industry professionals, UW students, and faculty.

Benefits

By participating in EIH, you have the opportunity to:

  • Develop innovative technical solutions that bring value to your company.
  • Vet a solution to a challenging problem, perhaps one that you don’t have the resources to pursue in-house.
  • Generate a deeper understanding of a health challenge, market, current solutions, intellectual property, and regulatory strategy that engages a comprehensive set of stakeholders.
  • Work closely with a diverse group of UW students and faculty from engineering, health sciences, and business.
  • Strengthen your relationship with the UW for recruiting student talent and for engaging in future projects.
  • Leverage world class infrastructure and facilities at UW.
  • Receive a nonexclusive commercial license to any project intellectual property developed by the student team or UW employees.

Involvement

The Engineering Innovation in Health program runs for 9 months. Projects typically start in the fall (October) and run for three quarters (ending in June).

Participating companies pay a sponsorship fee and designate an employee lead to mentor the team. The mentor meets with the team weekly to help them understand the problem in depth and guide the solution pathway.

Intellectual property is governed by existing federal and state laws and is subject to best practices of the University of Washington technology transfer office, CoMotion. A company wholly owns its existing intellectual property. A nonexclusive, commercial license will be granted to any project intellectual property developed by the student team or UW employees. Additional, pre-negotiated options for exclusive licenses have been standardized as part of the Washington Innovation Advantage Program.

The EIH process starts with industry sponsors or clinicians submitting a project idea that focuses on an unmet health challenge and ultimately ends with a working prototype solution, which can take the form of a device, process, or application. Project submissions are due on a rolling basis between May and August each year. We welcome you to reach out to us and discuss your ideas. Please contact EIHealth@uw.edu to learn more.

 

Submit a health challenge

 

Sample projects

For a full list of previous projects, visit the Projects section.

Safe&Sound »

Occupational hearing damages across the United States is still one of the largest occupational illnesses. Despite the advancements in hearing protection technologies such as materials and designs, the rate of people who suffer hearing losses has not decreased over the years. This is partially due to a lack of the awareness of hazardous noise exposure. Thus a solution that provides noise level awareness would help those at risk of hearing damage properly protect themselves. For example, people who work at nuclear power plants carry radiation meter to warn of the dangerous radiation exposure or houses are required to have carbon monoxide detectors to inform people of the danger of intoxication. These harmful elements are difficult to see, thus, difficult for people to protect themselves. Safe&Sound's solution is to reduce occupational hearing loss by making the invisible noise visible like radiation meter and carbon monoxide detector. Their solution consists of an integrated microphone design with the capability to detect various hazards.

Biloccult »

Biloccult is an innovative point of care test for frontline health care providers to reliably screen for neonates with bilious vomiting to identify and prevent intestinal damage by detecting the presence of bile in infant vomit. Within 30 minutes of contact with the sample, the results window will show a clear and binary response to the presence of bile with minimal contact to the vomit. In contrast to the current method of visual inspection, our solution uses antibodies specific to bile indicators, and a novel filtration system to enable rapid and specific detection of bile in newborn vomit.

FlushCut »

Nearly 10,000 patients are diagnosed with T4 oral cancer of the lower jaw each year in the U.S. To treat this aggressive form of cancer, the fibula bone is removed from the patient’s leg and reconstructed to replace the affected mandible. The current technique used to reconstruct the mandible from the fibula utilizes tongue depressors to measure and notate where the fibula ought to be cut -- a tedious and time-consuming process for a procedure that can take up to 12 hours to complete and can cost upwards of $100,000. FlushCut is a tool that can be used to aid in the precise cutting of the fibula with three degrees of angular and linear freedom.