HiNT (Healthcare Innovation in NeuroTechnology), a team of McMaster entrepreneurs, was one of 11 Ontario innovators awarded with $50K from the Ontario Brain Institute’s ONtrepreneurs program.
The funds will support the development of HiNT’s wearable monitoring device that alerts high-risk patients who are having a stroke. If a patient has a stroke during sleep, the device wakes the patient up and alerts the healthcare provider so that treatment can be administered more effectively.
The team behind HiNT is McMaster Engineering alumnus, Nawal Behih and W Booth School of Engineering Practice entrepreneurship students, Ahmed Elmeligi and Jacob Jackson.
Elmeligi represented the HiNT team in pitching their device to two panels of Ontario Brain Institute judges.
“We are very excited about winning the award,” he said. “It came at a perfect time for us as we are just starting to validate our system at hospitals.”
“When a stroke occurs, you have a window of four and a half hours to receive treatment,” said Behih for an article in the Fall 2016 Issue of MacEngineer.
But if a stroke happens in the middle of the night, there’s no way of knowing when it occurred. The result is doctors can’t properly treat their patients, and many patients are at an increased risk of experiencing a second, more debilitating stroke.
Up until now, HINT has earned close to $30K in seed funding for the device. This award will bring them one step closer to bringing the device to market.
Since 2012, the ONtrepreneurs program has awarded $50,000 to 34 entrepreneurs. The program helps early-stage entrepreneurs take their ideas from the lab to the marketplace.
