The goal of the Qualcomm Wireless Innovation Prize is for University of Wisconsin students to develop new wireless technology products and marry those ideas with tangible, market-ready business plans.
Consider that accomplished.
On Thursday, Isabel Callan, Yuan He, Katherine Hildebrand and Amanda MacAllister won $10,000 for creating software to more efficiently screen for cervical cancer. Named AlgoCerv, the software “enables people with limited medical training to scan Pap smear slides and provide results to a patient before she leaves the clinic,” according to a university release.
“It was the right mix of having something that was original and meeting a specific key need,” Samir Gupta of Qualcomm, who served as a judge, said in a statement. “The real need in industry was quite clear.”
Second place and $5,000 went to a team that developed an electronic patch that reads a user’s gestures to execute a pre-programmed command, such as making a call or loading an app.
Eleven teams entered this year’s contest.