Congratulations to Chapman and Anisha, aka Team Medicus, who impressed judges from UCL to win this year’s MedTech challenge and a prize of £500. Below is Chapman’s write up of the event and his team’s winning proposal.

MedTech is an amazing opportunity for the bright scientific and engineering minds of NCS. NCS being in a partnership with a prestigious university like UCL allowed this experience to happen. Groups of two to three competed in a fun and enthralling experience to create an innovative piece of medical technology, which will help improve the lives of patients. Our pitch was presented to a panel of highly-qualified experts (and of course the NCS very own physics teacher Mr Farhat!) MedTech is a great opportunity for anyone considering a field within the sciences, especially if you’re interested within the research sector as this task was fundamentally about carrying out the correct research in order to create a winning vision.

Our team, Medicus, decided to focus on asthmatics. Our idea was a wristband that helped the managing of the debilitating lung disease. We focused on three aspects, with the mantra of improving asthmatics’ quality of life. These were internal monitoring, external monitoring and an emergency help function. The challenge of creating a piece of technology is understanding how it actually works. After weeks of research and experimenting, we decided on the logistics on how our “BioBand” would actually work. The internal aspect would work by measuring the concentration of fraction exhale nitric oxide in a chemiluminescence reaction and the external aspect works by using air monitors functioned by photoionisation detectors. As a product, we were very passionate about our idea as we see the true potential of the BioBand and the benefits that could be created.

The MedTech experience has definitely been a learning curve, we both explored our abilities and developed traits such as perseverance and grit in order to win the competition. It wasn’t easy coming up with a viable idea, let alone deciding on how the technology would actually come into fruition as we both had limited knowledge in engineering. However, we had the drive to learn and succeed within the process. We believe that having a growth mindset and a proactive attitude was key to success, we learnt that resilience is a must.

Photos