Four students Jitesh Chhabria, Phillip Chan, Derek Yip and Yang Xi of the MPhil Program in Technology, Leadership and Entrepreneurship (TLE) won Champion at the first Healthcare Designathon Competition. The winning team NGgear designed the product, namely “Fit-Kick”, for athletes to improve performance and prevent injuries. The AIA Group which sponsored the contest sees the product’s potential, and is advising the students on its future development. The team will hold talks with AIA EDGE, The AIA Group’s innovation unit, and venture capitalists in the upcoming weeks for discussions on commercializing the product. 

Fit-Kick is a sensor-embedded ankle sleeves which track the lower body movement of athletes. It offers gait analysis, form suggestions, gamifying recovery, and ghost-assisted training, with applications extending from soccer to martial arts. The team has gone through the consultation of several experts including kickboxer Alain Ngalani, a four-time Muay Thai world champion representing Hong Kong; Theodore Lo, an angel fund investor and founder of fitness center Crossfit 852; and Ed Haynes, former Hong Kong Rugby team member and founder of Coastal Fitness. Mr Steve Monaghan, the head of AIA EDGE gave credits to the award-winning students, and said “The students of HKUST demonstrated the incredible potential of digital in health. Their capability in creating innovative solutions demonstrated the potential to completely change the way we diagnose and treat health problems faced by many of us in today’s society.” 

The competition was organized by the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department with support from the Entrepreneurship Center. Prof Michael Sung, Associate Director of the Entrepreneurship Center mentioned “in contrast to other hackathon competitions where products are thrown together over an intense weekend of activity, we focus on a design marathon or ‘designathon’ concept, where we lead all the competing teams through a well thought-out design process over a period of six weeks to optimize product concepts that take into account customer needs, business viability, technical feasibility, and ultimately market and societal impact.” “The sophistication of the winning design concepts demonstrated the success of the designathon concept, and we are already working on a follow-on designathon competition to be held in spring with sponsorship from brinc – a leading internet of things (IOT) venture fund, to help spark the development of exciting hardware-based products locally in Hong Kong,” he added.

The contest aims at providing enough resources and mentorship to guide the winning teams to develop viable products that can be developed further into commercial reality. AIA is collaborating with Nest, a leading startup incubator in Hong Kong, to provide a health and wearable tech accelerator platform to help shape the winning design concepts into real product that can benefit AIA’s customer community. By aligning university innovation with downstream accelerator support, the impact of the designathon competition can be multiplied by the strategic alignment of resources in Hong Kong’s innovation ecosystem.