Hi everyone, I'm Jim McDonough. I co-lead
the Applied Medical Engineering Lab in the
office of the Vice President for Research.
And we're here today at our Remote and
Austere Conditions Grand Challenge.
This is one of the University of Utah's
preeminent events to bring together really
innovative approaches that our research community
is taking to solving real world problems.
The setup for this is
use-inspired research.
And a lot of people don't know, but all
over the campus of the University of Utah
are great teams of investigators who are
putting forward solutions, very novel solutions
to real-world problems. So the Office
of the Vice President of Research, the
Applied Medical and Engineering Lab are
sponsoring annually our Remote and Austere
Conditions Grand Challenge. It's a pitch
competition. It's Shark Tank for investigative
teams who come together, present their
ideas, and hopefully walk away with a share
of the president's prize package of a million
dollars to water samples to communicating
with people in remote and austere
conditions to advancements in medicine from
skin cancer to tuberculosis and it really is
one of those opportunities for our university
and its investigative teams to shine
the quality of the presentations and the
types of projects being presented I think
are going to have really important impact
and the way they are conducting these
evaluations is is just inspiring. I think that
as a judge coming back from my second time
I am never I never cease to be amazed
at just how important this work is and how
important it is that the leadership at the
University of Utah supports this kind of
effort. I look forward to hearing more the
presentations today and seeing the important
discoveries that will come out of the
University of Utah in the years to come.
Last year my advisor, Alan Kuntz, pitched
the idea of a three -armed medic which is a
robotic arm that assists in pre-hospital medical
interventions which will pick up an object
and place it in your hands when you ask
it for it. The remote and austere conditions
grant has been really great because it's
given us the opportunity to develop this robotic
system that we probably would not have
gotten funding to develop otherwise. We're
grateful for the RAC project and the program.
Hi, my name is Julie Fritz. I'm a professor
in physical therapy, and today I had the
opportunity to present work we're doing on
telehealth physical therapy for people with
chronic pain. My name is Dr. J.R. Pickett from
the Department of Emergency Medicine, the EMS
section here at University of Utah. I just
gave a pitch here at the RAC Grand Challenge
where we proposed to deploy novel precipitation
measurement devices for monitoring the
snowpack in remote locations in the mountains
nearby Salt Lake City but also worldwide.
I'm presenting a small handheld device
for analgesia and anesthesia in the
pre-hospital setting for use in EMS or
rescue or combat settings. When I
learned about this competition and the
focus on remote and austere conditions.
It really resonated with work that my team
has been doing to try to provide better care
for people who live in remote conditions.
So it sounded like a great opportunity and it
was fun to put together our team and work
with the coaches and then have a chance to
come here and present our work with other
colleagues who are all doing really exciting
things. It was really exciting to be part of
this program because we had to prepare a
short eight-minute pitch, something that
professors aren't used to doing being so tightly
scripted and it's exciting to see all the
others presentations too how well they were
presented and the novelty and importance of
the work they were doing I've never presented
to this panel of experts before and seeing
all these different ideas that are just so
creative and people are so passionate about
it's just a really neat experience being
here this time I'm very glad to be part of it