By Kitty Liao and Abellona U of Ideabatic, IGHI’s 2017 Student Challenges Competition winners
So much has happened since we won the Student Challenges Competition last year. The prize from the competition has been very helpful for us to secure our UK patent. Following that, we have recently submitted our global patent.
In terms of the exciting things that have happened since, first off, we welcomed Emily Branson, undergraduate student from design engineering, who joined the team as the campaign designer. Kitty pitched at the Dubai Expo 2020 and was awarded $100,000 over a 12-month period. Part of the funding from Expo 2020 contributed towards our field trip. In September, we went on a field trip to Nigeria to observe how vaccines are actually delivered. The trip was extremely insightful for us to observe how the logistics actually work in the field and gave us new ideas to tailor our product for the actual need.
We were also shortlisted as the Top 500 startups at Hello Tomorrow, a platform for deep tech startups, and we attended the Hello Tomorrow conference held in Paris last month.
Back at Imperial College, these days, we are busy conducting heat transfer experiments. Having brought back cool boxes that have actually been used in the field in Nigeria, we are benchmarking our prototype against the currently available products.
We would like to thank IGHI for their funding and allowed us to raise awareness for our project. We would also like to give special thanks to Dubai Expo 2020 and eHealth Africa for making our field trip possible.
Our next steps are to firstly do further R&D to develop the next prototype which will be field tested and secondly prepare to launch our crowdfunding campaign to fund our development and field test.
We are constantly looking for like-minded people to join the team and we welcome students to join for development work. So do not hesitate to contact us if you are driven by the same cause.
Ideabatic
W: http://www.ideabatic.com
E: info@ideabatic.com
2018’s Student Challenges Competition is now open for applications. Click here to find out more.