Techcelerator 2019

Pitch Night 2019

On the evening of Wednesday 3 July 2019, 18 budding prototypers, and teams of prototypers, pitched their ideas to solve real-world problems with Deep Tech at the FEIT Deep Tech Early-Stage Accelerator Pitch Night.

On the evening of Wednesday 3 July 2019, 18 budding prototypers, and teams of prototypers, pitched their ideas to solve real-world problems with Deep Tech at the FEIT Deep Tech Early-Stage Accelerator Pitch Night. The pitches came from across the faculty and covered a variety of Deep Tech areas, including sustainable technologies, bioengineering, Internet of things, additive manufacturing, AI, mechatronics, robotics, and interaction design.

The candidates pitching were competing for entry to the pilot program of the FEIT Techcelerator. The Accelerator will run from July to December 2019 and is aimed at developing FEIT student’s prototyping skills. The program comes with funding, access to facilities and mentorship of experts, to help enable the development of a prototype.

The high quality of ideas pitched made judging very difficult for the group of faculty members and industry experts assembled to assess the entries. The Deep Tech team extends a huge thank you to all those that attended and pitched their concepts, and the judges that diligently assessed the entries. The top pitches from the evening and their Chief Technology Officers joining the 2019 Techcelerator program are

• Jefferson Hora with Abundant Energy Harvesting Technology: An efficient and abundant energy harvesting technology from the ambient environment (e.g. RF and indoor light), and integration into devices by the novel design of integrated chips in nanotechnology node
• Behrokh Abbasnejad with Smart Posture Memory Clothing (SPMC): Future of rehabilitation. Uses real-time Vibro-Tactile Feedback (VTF) embedded into clothing, to help patients perform the correct rehab exercise without specialist support, in their own home.
• Sadia Khan with SkinSaver: A skin lesion detection application aimed at detecting and identifying skin issues of all kinds including skin cancer.
• Steven Vasilescu with Hybrid Microfluidic Sperm Sorter: A Hybrid Microfluidic Sperm Sorter to Boost Fertility Rates. By eliminating the harmful, cell-damaging steps involved in current sperm processing technology, this is an automated, quick and high throughput system that better mimics natural sperm selection
• Braeden Knox with SMART Ring 3: This product is a wearable ring that controls the media player on the user’s phone.
• Georgia Kirkpatrick-Jones with Arula: 3D printing breast prosthesis for women who've had mastectomies due to Breast cancer.

Congratulations to the successful individuals and teams! Selection for the program was a competitive process and these individuals and teams show great prototyping potential. The Techcelerator team looks forward to seeing their prototype develop and hopefully reporting their success at the end of the program in December. For more information on the prototypes see the 2019 Prototypes webpage.