Meet our 2023 Winners

Medical imaging is the backbone of clinical medicine, informing diagnostic and patient management decisions across the healthcare system. The ever-growing number of medical examinations and worldwide decrease in staff challenges radiologists and healthcare providers to read more complex scans with decreasing resources while maintaining high standards of clinical excellence. Because of this, even well-resourced healthcare systems face significant imaging backlogs. Under-resourced healthcare systems with low clinician-to-patient ratios may miss opportunities for early disease detection due to long patient wait times.

Advances in computer vision and natural language AI continue to unlock new ways to explore the billions of images across our devices, websites, and the public domain. However, it remains difficult to express subjective concepts, such as visual tones (‘vibrant’) or moods (‘eclectic’) to current systems, where visual interpretation is shaped by culture and community and is personal to the individual.

Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) kills over 350,000 people every single year in the U.S. alone. It is the leading cause of death for adults over the age of 40 and also leads to the loss of nearly 23,000 youth annually. Despite being a massive public health issue, survival rates have unfortunately remained dismal at around 10% for decades. Fortunately, there’s a treatment for Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) – a life-saving shock from an Automated External Defibrillator (AED). If used quickly, an AED can be highly effective. However, the problem is that AEDs are not readily accessible, and too often don’t get to the people who need them. Avive is on a mission to change that. With each passing minute prior to treatment reducing a victim’s chance of survival by 7%, an AED’s accessibility, design, and usability make the difference between life and death. Our strategic design collaboration with Avive focused on developing a first-of-its-kind connected AED system. In addition to a standard AED’s capabilities, the Avive Connect AED™ is a portable device that, when spread across a community, acts as a mesh-network of coverage enabling support to any individual within the radius of that network. When activated, the network of AEDs and local responders are alerted to find the closest AED to the victim. Once an AED is activated, it provides diagnosis and instruction to both professional and pedestrian users supporting a victim of sudden cardiac arrest.

Little Signals, a series of interaction experiments, explores new behaviors for technology in our daily lives. The objects in the series signal for attention with different sensorial cues like a waft of air, a soft shadow, or an ambient sound. Additionally, their simple movements and controls bring them to life and make them responsive to changing surroundings and needs. Just as everyday items find simple ways to inform us – like the moving hands of a clock or the whistle of a kettle – this series shows how to stay up-to-date with digital information while maintaining moments of calm.

Engaging men in family planning and nutrition programming provides an opportunity to move towards better health and gender outcomes. To meet this goal, we designed two innovative programs in rural Bihar, India, using Human-centered Design (HCD) research, co-creation, and prototype testing, grounded in behavioral science approaches.

Jammies are a set of musical instruments designed to improve the quality of life for people living with mild to moderate Dementia by empowering them to reminisce, improvise and jam along to music that is of personal value to them without assuming any prior musical ability or knowledge. They are envisaged to be part of the vastly ignored recreational product ecosystem for people living with Dementia (PLWD) managed by their caregivers or as a part of the toolbox music therapy professionals employ.

Carbon Insights helps people to learn about the CO2 impact of their purchases based on payment data and a personal profile. In addition, we give educational tips on how to lower your carbon footprint. By applying the lean startup method, we were able to accelerate innovation and be the first Dutch bank to make this available within the consumer banking app.

DOLL-SITTER is a toy set of pop-up smart books and application for sex education for children aged 5-8, using dolls which play the role of body organs and children played as their protectors. Through the interaction of dolls and smart pop-up books, children can learn about sex education, establish life scenes, and discuss with their parents the sex education issues in the “difficult to speak” life. Parents use APP and cards for parent-child interaction, complete the task of protecting the doll together, talk about sensitive topics, and answer children’s doubts about the body through the elf. It aims to cultivate long-term Comprehensive Sexuality Education, stimulate children’s curiosity about sexual knowledge, and weaken the embarrassment of traditional parents in front of sexual knowledge.