The winners of the contest came from “team C.U.T.E.” The group of teens designed an autonomous robot which can deliver food to rooms, which UCHealth said could one day free up hospital staff to handle other duties.
Several students from the St. Vrain Valley School District are being praised for their innovative ideas on how to better develop the future of health care. Students from the district partnered with UCHealth to research how hospitals currently operate and were tasked with designing a better “hospital room of the future.”
Other proposals included a watch that monitored patients for cardiac arrest, a redesign of the ICU rooms to improve comfort and one team designed glasses and an app that would assist medical staff in their daily duties.
“Over the past year, St. Vrain Valley students studied the challenges faced by health care today and explored ways to create new solutions by approaching a challenge using the scientific process; creativity, being innovative and fearlessly approaching a problem in a new way,” said Dr. Richard Zane, UCHealth’s chief innovation officer.
“Through this unique partnership, UCHealth offered students — our future innovators, scientists, researchers, clinicians and patient experience leaders — a chance to learn from our experts. We encouraged outside-the-box thinking, and we were very impressed today with their efforts,” he wrote.
The winning team was made up of students Jocelyn Gunn, Alec Miller, Ryan Velarde and Mia Novick. The students came from Longmont, Erie and Niwot high schools.
“This project was an opportunity to see a different side of health care that I’ve never really seen before. I’ve always been super passionate about biology and medicine, but I’ve never really considered the technical aspect that goes into behind the scenes,” Gunn said. “It was really interesting to see those two fields coming together and what that means for health care field.”
