Innovation Challenge Blog

08.05.11

Congratulations to the 5 Semi-Finalists!

We are pleased to announce our five semi-finalists and their concepts for the sanofi-aventis U.S. Innovation Challenge: Data, Design, Diabetes.

Earlier this week, a panel of expert judges reviewed an amazingly diverse and creative set of submissions to choose the most innovative data-driven and human-centered concepts aimed at helping people living with diabetes. Here is a brief introduction to the five leading concepts and their respective teams:

  • Wellfra.me
    Wellfra.me is a platform that empowers diabetics to make a meaningful change and reduce their risk of complications. Wellfra.me personalizes publicly available data and creates individualized challenges and rewards to put diabetics back in control.

    • Team leader: Trishan Panch – Founder and Clinical Lead at My Care Apps
    • Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
  • Ginger.io
    Ginger.io transforms a mobile phone into an automatic self-monitoring tool for tracking real-time movement patterns and social interactions passively, without user input.

    • Team leader: Karan Singh – Co-founder; MIT Sloan MBA and Harvard Medical SM Candidate
    • Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
  • Great Races Community Projects
    Great Races Community Projects gets people moving through Amazing Race-style competitions to find QR codes planted in local venues.

    • Team leader: Jennifer Chong – Researcher at MIT Innovations in International Health; Consultant at Oliver Wyman
    • Location: San Francisco, California
  • Chewable
    Chewable is a mobile gaming service that helps people with diabetes understand the best food choices, and tracks their progress toward meeting healthy goals through food interactions.

    • Team leader: Girish Gupta – EIR at ENIAC Ventures
    • Location: New York, New York
  • HopeUnwounded
    HopeUnwounded is a website combining uploaded patient data (pictures, glucose + insulin levels) with analyses of anonymous hospital data to prevent, diagnose, and treat diabetic foot injuries.

    • Team leader: Stephen Racunas – Grass Roots Science
    • Location: New Kensington, Pennsylvania

Each semi-finalist has been awarded $20,000, and a team of experts to virtually mentor them as they each turn their concept into a prototype over the next month.

We will detail the progress of the five semi-finalists throughout this process, leading up to the Data, Design, Diabetes Demo Day in mid-September.

For real-time updates from the Data Design Diabetes challenge, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.