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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.

SleepAssist »

Approximately 50% of patients with obstructive sleep apnea have difficulty tolerating the most effective, first-line therapy, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), and other solutions such as mouthguards and surgery have lower efficacy and higher costs and risks. Patients struggle to adhere to CPAP therapy due to the noise, discomfort of the mask, and lack of portability during travel. A solution to treat obstructive sleep apnea that is lower cost and promotes greater adherence would improve management of obstructive sleep apnea.

InSTENT Connection »

Using staples and/ or stitches to create GI anastomoses often results in leaking of GI content, which leads to severe health issues, including infection, sepsis, and death. Among the approximately 700,000 GI surgeries performed worldwide involving anastomoses on colon cancer patients, leaking can occur in up to 30% of patients, and mortality rates from these leaks can be as high as 39%, placing a severe emotional and financial burden on surgical patients worldwide. To address this, we partnered with a surgeon at UW Medicine to design a bioresorbable stent and compressive band system that can be used to create these surgical connections without the use of staples or stitches. The stent will be placed inside and between the two pieces of the colon that need to be surgically connected to each other. The barbs on the exterior of the stent will prevent the migration of the device. Once the stent is implanted, the compressive band will be secured outside the pieced of the overlapped intestine, centered at the anastomotic site. The band will clamp the intestine ends to the stent and act as an additional barrier against leaking of the GI content from the surgical site. Once the wound has healed naturally, the internal stent and compressive band will degrade and be resorbed by the body over time, leaving only the new tissue growth over the surgical site. 

 

InSTENT Connection

Aeroception »

With the COVID-19 pandemic, new challenges in dealing with airborne pathogens have been brought to light across many fields, most notably in dentistry. During dental procedures, the use of the necessary surgical instruments contributes to the production of bioaerosols putting medical staff and other patients at risk of infection. It is important to point out that many opportunistic respiratory infections are traced back to oral microbiota, further highlighting the importance of prevention. While current transmission-based precautions may help limit the spread, they do not prevent the spread altogether. Aeroception is working on a device to improve air quality around the patient’s oral cavity and the dental practitioners by reducing the number of contaminated aerosols and removing it out of clinical space, to better protect dental staff and patients in dental offices.  Their solution is a suction device that directs 99% of aerosols produced during dental visits away from the practitioners and removes it from the clinical space completely.