Award-Winning Success for Health Tech Startup
A team of three MPhil Program in Technology Leadership and Entrepreneurship (TLE) students achieved further success when their innovative FITKICK product won the Championship and HKSTP Technopreneur Award (Gold Award) in the YDC E-Challenge 2015 last month and the Gold Award in the JEC Outstanding Engineering Project Awards (OEPA) 2015 this month.
Developed by Jitesh Chhabria, Wing Hong Chan and Wing Hang Yip, FITKICK is a high-performance compression garment for the leg that offers virtually assisted training, prevents injury and improves recovery compliance with gamified experience. With bio-mechanical trackers embedded seamlessly into the fabric, FITKICK motion captures the athlete’s lower body in real-time to produce an accurate visualization of human performance. The product can track, record and analyse movement without smartphone connection and the wide range of data generated from the extensive capture of lower body movements includes speed, distance, stride length, gait analysis, jump height and agility. It is easily adaptable in a small form of sleeves athletes have worn for years. It requires no direct skin contact to function and is unaffected by body hair, sweat or undergarments.
The team started the development of FITKICK seven months ago when they participated in HKUST’s Healthcare Designathon Competition in Dec 2014 and became the Champion. They later became one of the eight teams across Asia selected to join the highly competitive AIA Accelerator program, where they received mentorship and support from a leading startup incubator and industry experts, gained access to funding and the opportunity to pitch.
They are currently building the 5th iteration of prototypes, with built-in algorithms and an Android mobile app. Over the last few months, they have set up their own company “Sensable Dynamics” and have grown their team with the addition of Michael Siu as electronic engineer and Ming Tsang as software developer, both are students from School of Engineering, as well as an art director and an apparel designer.
The team is planning to partner with some local or other potential sports teams to conduct product trials and collect their feedback by the end of this year and engage in crowdfunding early next year. They aim to produce the first batch of FITKICK and have the product shipped to those who support them in the crowdfunding campaign later next year.
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