Concussion Treating Device Wins Rothberg Catalyzer Prize

OnTrack Rehab, a project that grew out of Medical Device Design and Innovation (MENG/BENG 404), won the Rothberg Catalyzer Prize @ Yale at StartUp Yale.

The project, designed to help doctors better diagnose and rehabilitate patients with concussions, won the $15,000 prize at Friday’s event at the Yale School of Management. The team, which consists of Holly Zhou and Brian Beitler, Mrinal Kumar, and Pong Trairatvoraku, competed against three other finalists, each of whom had an allotted amount of time to pitch their projects.

The four team members, who all graduated last year, had begun the project at the Center for Engineering Innovation & Design (CEID) while taking the medical design course taught by Joe Zinter. Working with Eliot Hu, then Yale’s director of athletic medicine, the team designed and built a three-component system. It features a virtual reality headset with eye tracking and motion detection, a physical balance board with adjustable stability that tracks the center of gravity, and a cloud platform that collects and synthesizes the data.

How it works: a patient recovering from a concussion balances on the platform of the device wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset. The balance board is equipped with load cells and an accelerometer to measure the patient’s center of gravity. While balancing on the board, the patient wears the virtual reality headset and interacts with a virtual environment. Data collected by the balance board and the VR system is combined with the patient’s subjective observations, such as dizziness or headache) to evaluate the progress of their recovery.

Startup Yale is a three-day event sponsored in part by the Tsai Center for Innovation and Thinking (CITY) brings together Yale’s biggest entrepreneurship awards.