Stories & Spotlights
Read about interesting projects coming out of Stanford Biodesign and the remarkable people who make them happen.
-
A Sore Throat Can Hurt Your Child's Heart
Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) starts in childhood as strep throat. If not properly treated, it can lead to debilitating heart damage and death. To increase awareness of the early symptoms of RHD and its consequences in India, three Stanford-India Biodesign Fellows teamed up with Edwards Lifesciences to produce a public service video.
-
Reducing Costs and Improving Care—Stanford Biodesign Fellows Take The Pain Out of ICU Intubation
The spiraling cost of healthcare has created urgent demand for new health technologies that not only improve outcomes for patients, but significantly reduce costs. Motivated by this imperative, two Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellows are helping create a new standard of care to enable intensive care unit patients on ventilators cope with the intense discomfort of the breathing tube without intravenous narcotics that often cause costly and even devastating complications.
-
Stanford Biodesign Fellow Sets Sights On Improving Healthcare In China
It is well known that many graduates of Stanford’s Biodesign Innovation Fellowship have gone on to launch groundbreaking health technologies for the US and other developed markets. Some graduates have taken a different path, however, choosing to apply their expertise to improve healthcare in countries where resources are limited and pressing unmet medical needs are abundant. One such alumna, Dorothea Koh, is working in China to develop disruptive innovations that bring better healthcare to millions of people.
-
To Help Protect Vulnerable Newborns, Stanford Biodesigners Create New Tool
Eighty percent of low birthweight babies admitted to the pediatric neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) require an umbilical catheter to provide vital nutrition and medication. While these catheters serve as lifelines for the fragile babies, they can also be the source of costly and potentially lethal blood stream infections. A team of students from the Stanford Biodesign Innovation course is determined to eliminate this risk with an innovative new approach.
-
Innovative System from Stanford Biodesign Fellows Helps Parents and Children Say Goodnight To Sleep Terrors
Watching a child experience sleep/night terrors is devastating. They rouse from sleep abruptly, crying and in great distress. Attempts to comfort them are usually ineffective, since the child isn’t fully awake. The episodes may occur nightly, interrupting the child’s rest and exhausting parents. Inspired by personal experience, two Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellows teamed up to develop the Sleep Guardian, a digital system for disrupting this distressing, potentially harmful cycle.
-
Undergraduate Bioengineering Students Address Real-World Medical Problems in Senior Capstone Design Course
The Bioengineering Senior Capstone Design course challenges undergraduate bioengineering students to use their training in research, engineering, and life sciences to address a real-world health need. By working their way through Biodesign’s deliberate, step-by-step process of health technology innovation, students gain confidence in their ability to find a compelling need and engineer a solution. Along the way, they also develop practical skills outside of the engineering discipline that better equip them for future success.
-
Why Become a Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellow? (2:35)
Each year, 12 unique individuals participate in the Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellowship to catalyze or accelerate careers in health technology innovation. In this video, a subset of the 2015-16 fellows explain why they chose Stanford Biodesign and what the training experience is like.
-
Stanford Biodesign Team Creates App To Help Caregivers Meet The Challenges Of Dementia
The effort required to meet the daily, changing needs of a loved one with dementia is exhausting and even debilitating to the health of the caregiver. A new mobile app developed out of the Biodesign for Mobile Health course helps caregivers manage these challenges and remember the person they knew before dementia.
-
Biodesign Innovators Clear a Path to Market
Earwax build-up is a common condition that causes discomfort and impaired hearing. While the condition is simple, the treatment is not, generally requiring the services of a medical specialist. To make ear cleaning more accessible and less expensive, two Biodesign Innovators teamed up to develop a safe and effective ear cleaning device for primary care doctors that ultimately morphed into a successful consumer medical device called OTO-TIP.
-
Stanford Biodesign Helps Asia Pacific Region Strengthen Its Health Tech Innovation Ecosystem
Building on its own experience in the US, Stanford Biodesign recently had the unique opportunity to help convene a group of leaders from universities and governmental institutions across the Asia Pacific region to help them explore potential synergies in teaching health technology innovation.
-
Osmind: Building a Platform for Breakthrough Mental Health
With Osmind, Stanford Biodesign student Lucia Huang and her co-founder Jimmy Qian used need-driven innovation principles to create an electronic health records system that allows psychiatrists to provide better treatment to individual patients while also collecting real-world data to advance the state of care more broadly.
-
Managing Diabetes in Pregnancy with a Digital App
Monitoring blood sugar levels and sharing the data with care providers can be overwhelming. Malama makes it easier.
-
From the Innovator's Workbench with Anne Wojcicki
As a featured speaker in the Stanford Biodesign From the Innovator’s Workbench series, Wojcicki told the story of her groundbreaking company, 23andMe —from its origin through her decision to take the company public with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that raised nearly $600 million. Read the story here.
-
Stanford Biodesign Policy Survey Finds Multi-Year Delays in Access to Breakthrough Medical Devices
New research from the Health Technology Innovation Policy Program at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign quantifies the delays in Medicare coverage of breakthrough technologies and the benefits of an accelerated pathway in encouraging invention and investment in areas of critically important unmet clinical needs.
-
Singapore Biodesign: Eleven Years of Growth Culminates in Prestigious Affiliate Status
Over 11 years, Singapore Biodesign has grown from a single class of fellows to a robust capability initiative that has met the rigorous criteria needed to be awarded affiliate status.
More About Our Impact
Learn more about the Stanford Biodesigners, their exciting careers, and the impact they’re having in the healthcare field.