CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund Awardees – Spring 2024

Prosthetic users frequently suffer from deteriorating prosthetic fit resulting in discomfort and residual limb injury. However, it is very challenging for prosthetists to adjust prosthetics to ensure a good fit over time due to the lack of detailed and timely data on the prosthetic fit when in use. We are developing the Prosthetic Fit 360, an unobtrusive wearable monitor that collects fit data alerting prosthetic users and prosthetists of deteriorating fit before it becomes a problem.

As chronic liver disease progresses, patients can suffer from increasing neurological impairment but currently lack a good way to monitor symptoms to know when take action. We have developed Beacon, an easy-to-use device based on critical flicker frequency allowing chronic liver disease patients to track neurological impairment from home so they can best manage their condition.

Teachers spend on average seven hours a week on lesson preparation and while many teachers have turned to AI tools to create individualized lessons, such tools fail to follow best pedagogical practices and often make basic factual errors, especially in mathematics. To meet teacher needs, we have created Colleague, a cutting-edge AI with domain knowledge in effective math education to offer high-quality and personalized learning for all students.

Small businesses cannot afford commercial workplace wellness programs, but their employees are at high risk for health conditions that impact the bottom line. Connect to Wellness is a low-cost, rigorously-tested wellness program that offers expert consultation and customized tools tailored explicitly to the capacities of small businesses and the health needs of their employees.

Prediabetes is not often caught because screening methods are too cumbersome and costly for mass deployment, resulting in missed opportunities to reduce the prevalence of diabetes. To make prediabetes screening easier, we have built GlucoScreen, a low-cost, easy to use device for anyone with a smartphone.

Aligning bone fragments in orthopedic fracture surgery is difficult and requires specialized tools which are rigid and cumbersome to use resulting in more anesthesia time and bigger incisions for the patient, frustration and lost time for the surgeon, and increases costs for a hospital. We have designed a novel fracture alignment tool for orthopedic surgeons featuring a flexible gooseneck linkage that locks into any position reducing surgical time, minimizes blood loss, and enhances overall surgical efficiency while reducing hospital costs.

Many current medical instruments, such as endoscopes, are too bulky to reach narrow areas of the body such as for stroke treatment.  We are developing GuideEye, an ultrathin, flexible forward-viewing endoscope, enabling image guided surgeries in constrained and previously inaccessible parts of the human body.

Kidney dialysis 5-year survival rates are only 35-42% due to toxins bound to carrier proteins (albumin) that are too large to be removed by dialyzer membranes and cause long-term cardiac damage. We have developed a novel and safe system to remove these toxins from whole blood that can be directly attached to conventional dialysis machines. With this innovation dialysis patients will be able to live longer and healthier lives while saving the healthcare systems billions.

Ultrafiltration water filtration membranes used in industries such as semiconductor manufacturing suffer from low durability and chemical resistance resulting in the expensive membranes soon becoming irreversibly fouled resulting in high costs and downtime. NanoXTract is developing a novel water filtration system using durable, chemically resistant polymer membranes that can be cleaned far more times saving money and time for manufacturers.

Brain tumor resection has a low success rate due to the challenges of identifying tumor margins to ensure enough of the tumor is removed without taking any more healthy tissue than necessary. We have developed an advanced AI tumor segmentation model that produces fast and accurate brain tumor analytics for neuroradiologists and imaging centers to aid in surgical planning and in the operating room.

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are the most common bacterial infection globally, affecting 150 million people annually. UTIs have a severe impact on patients, including discomfort, reduced quality of life with potential complications such as kidney infections, and even sepsis and permanent kidney damage if not treated properly. To better treat UTIs we are developing a vaccination that provides long-term protection against UTIs.

Stem cells are widely used in research, medicine and synthetic meat production but are challenging to culture due the natural proteins in cell growth serum which is inherently variable resulting in high costs, low stability, contamination, and variable cell quality. We have developed de novo synthetic protein substitutes using AI-based methods to replace the unstable and non-specific native proteins used in media today, to create a synthetic growth media mix that is cheap to manufacture, has higher stability, and elicits consistently robust signaling activity that can improve stem cell culture quality and differentiation efficiency while lowering the cost of material/labor and avoiding the safety concerns of animal-derived components.