Mumbai, 16th September 2016:A team comprising four students, two each from Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kasturba Medical College (KMC), won the first prize in Hackabout 2016 and a cash award of Rs one lakh in the competition to design and prototype a solution to identified medical problems. The competition was organized by Philips and Manipal University for students of KMC and MIT. The runners-up were a team of four from MIT. They walked away with a purse of Rs 75,000. The prize distribution function was held at the MIT Library Auditorium on Monday.
The winning team comprised Shikhar Srivastava and Reuben John of MIT and Sidharth R and Siddharth Pratap Nene of KMC. The team worked on the theme, “Evaluation of Causative Factors for amlodipine induced pedal edema”. The runners-up team consisted of; Abhishek Karan, Elvis Louis D’Souza, Shreyas Hebbar, Malvika Sandhu and Raghav Chawla. Their theme was, “Role of metabolic obesity and BMI in patients with coronary artery disease”. A total of 49 teams took part and each team was allowed to have up to five students.
“The competition was unique, interesting, and very exciting too,” said the participants. Forty nine teams took part in the competition in which the KMC students were pitted against their counterparts from MIT. The competition was all about finding solution to medical problems using technology. “The students have come up with amazing solutions and we would be happy to have this as an annual event,” said Dr G.K. Prabhu, Director MIT while welcoming the gathering.
The problems were defined by KMC as the themes were on health care and the platform to solve them came from Philips. “This was a great opportunity for the participants to get a firsthand experience to work on the Philips Data Science Platform with real world data solving real life clinical problems,” said Mr Srinivas Prasad, CEO, Philips Innovation Campus, Bengaluru, the chief guest of the function.
Dr H. Vinod Bhat said that this was a good opportunity for students from different institutions to come together and work together. “It is more of a collaboration than competition. The students have jointly addressed problems that impact lives. The theme for the competition, health care, is close to my heart. India as a country is doing well in health care but needs to do more, particularly with emerging problems,” he said. ‘Simple innovations can make big changes in people’s lives,” he said in reference to the competition.
About Manipal University
Manipal University is synonymous with excellence in higher education. Over 28,000 students from 57 different nations live, learn and play in the sprawling University town, nestled on a plateau in Karnataka’s Udupi district. It also has nearly 2500 faculty and almost 10000 other support and service staff, who cater to the various professional institutions in health sciences, engineering, management, communication and humanities which dot the Wi-Fi-enabled campus.
The University has off-campuses in Mangalore and Bangalore, and off-shore campuses in Dubai(UAE) and Melaka (Malaysia). The Mangalore campus offers medical, dental, and nursing programs. The Bangalore Campus offers programs in Regenerative Medicine. The Dubai campus offers programs in engineering, management and architecture, and the Melaka campus offers programs in medicine and dentistry.