DIT engineering students have won an award with a new medical device to collect urine samples from infants, writes Dick Ahlstrom
There are few enough women in Irish third-level engineering courses, but when present they really can have an impact. Five women engineering students from the Dublin Institute of Technology recently claimed top prize in an all-Ireland enterprise competition and now hope to turn their project into a business.
The five are part of the first student intake of a new four-year engineering course in DIT's school of manufacturing design engineering, explains the head of the school, John Lawlor.
The product design course is unique here in that students receive a highly interdisciplinary curriculum that combines engineering, art and design and business, Lawlor says.
The school was delighted with the win in the all-Ireland student enterprise awards organised by Enterprise Ireland, Invest Northern Ireland and Ulster Bank, he states.
"We were so encouraged about this because the students are already achieving what we had hoped for from the new course. It is a great achievement for a programme that is in its infancy."
The enterprise competition is open to third level students from across the island and asks them to submit a business plan to create a new company of any kind. They compete for the title of College Entrepreneurs of the Year and share a prize fund this year worth €44,000, including €10,000 for first prize.
The five winners: Aisling Conroy, Audrey Maher, Jennifer Kent, Siobhan Groark and Honora Egan claimed the top prize at the competition in April with a project proposing the manufacture a novel new medical device.
Trading under the company name Eirmed, they provided details about the design, manufacture and marketing of a unique new aid for the collection of urine samples from infants.
The device is a Class One single use medical diagnostic device with the particularly appropriate name, "Eezy Peezy". It greatly simplifies the time-consuming business of collecting urine samples from infants, but could also be used with other patient categories, explains Kent.
"We brainstormed and we got hundreds of ideas," says Groark. Interest in developing a medical device of some kind quickly emerged as a leading contender, adds Conroy.
"There seemed to be a preference for a medical design. We liked the idea of doing something that wasn't a luxury item."
The work began in September as a required project for entry in DIT's own Bolton Trust Student Enterprise Competition and immediately began eating up huge amounts of time, sometimes 20 hours a week says Egan.
Their project achieved a third place in the Bolton Trust competition and it was then included with 157 others submitted for the all-Ireland event, held this year in Belfast. Their project was shortlisted among 10 and then claimed first prize.
The judges weighed up the business plan, which proposed manufacture in India for worldwide distribution, but the device itself also helped win the day. The original design, prototyped by the students, offered a range of benefits including being non-invasive and suited to home, hospital or a GP environment, explains Maher.
The new engineering honours degree programme included all the aspects needed to allow the five to design and prototype the product and then build a business argument in favour of its production, says Lawlor. The modularised course was designed in this way, to allow trained product engineering students to deal with the technical aspects, the finer design related concerns and also the business dimension.
"They should understand all aspects of this, all about the business, the product and the engineering concepts to be able to manufacture it," Lawlor says. "We are unique in DIT in that we can have this level of collaboration."
The five students still have a year to go before receiving their degree, but have already agreed to see where their new business opportunity takes them. They are going to invest their prize money in developing their idea and have begun to pursue a patent to protect their winning design.