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Elixir 2.0

The results of the Abstract Stage have been declared. To see the results, click here.
Students from any discipline of engineering can solve these problems. You do not have to be a professional in biomedicine to solve these problems.
The timeline for the competition has been changed. Refer to the Competition Structure for the changes in the dates.



Biomedical engineering is a unique and a fast emerging field combining aspects of various disciplines of science, technology and engineering and with a tremendous potential for development. With the stupendous success of Elixir in Techfest 2008, Techfest 2009 brings to you Elixir 2.0 which gives you a chance to leverage your expertise and domain-specific training to work in an interdisciplinary team with physicians and industry mentors and help save millions of lives with ingenious solutions to problems encountered in the field of biomedical engineering.


Prizes worth INR 1,20,000 to be won.

View the Problem Statements »


To register for this competition, click here.


To view the discussions on this competition, click here.


For further queries contact:


Agyeya Sharma

Manager, Prayaas
Techfest 2009
+91 98199 02815
agyeya[at]techfest[dot]org

Sidharth Mishra

Manager, Prayaas
Techfest 2009
+91 98198 14256
sidharthmishra[at]techfest[dot]org

This year, we are proposing an open biomedical design competition, in order to stimulate creative and innovative students to come up with solutions to current problems that impact the quality of care in urban and rural areas. We provide some sample problems for you to work on below - but if you see a need that catches your attention, you can also submit an abstract based on it.


I. Low-cost, low-power reliable Ventilator

Ventilators are used commonly in the operating theatre and in the ICU to deliver mechanical ventilation to the lungs. In the operating theatre, ventilation is in anaesthetized and often pharmacologically paralysed patients with predominantly normal lungs. Ventilators are relatively simple machines and are designed to deliver varying concentrations of oxygen, air, nitrous oxide and volatile agents to patients through an anaesthetic circuit.


In small scale hospitals, there is a pressing need for affordable low-cost ventilation and better oxygen management. With the rise in trauma surgeries, premature births, and respiratory diseases, the value of equipping hospitals in India and in other low-resource environments, with ventilators and affordable oxygen. Recently concluded survey data from the WHO Essential Health Technology and the Gates Foundation called the humble ventilator one of the most critical pieces of equipment in helping to improve health outcomes in rural areas.


Even in more "advanced" countries like the US and England, recent fears about the available of ventilators during outbreaks of avian flu etc. (that cause respiratory distress) have surfaced. A typical hospital ventilator can cost $30,000, and hospitals, operating on thin profit margins, say they cannot afford to buy and store hundreds of units that may never be used. Cheaper alternatives can be deployed in a crisis, but doctors say they are grossly inadequate to deal with a flu pandemic. In a recent emergency drill, said Dr. John L. Hick, a professor of emergency medicine at the Mayo Medical School in Minnesota, the 27 hospitals in his area could come up with only 16 extra ventilators when faced with a hypothetical outbreak of 400 cases of pneumonic plague. Dr. Hick wrote a recent paper for The Journal of Academic Emergency Medicine suggesting guidelines to determine in a crisis which patients should be taken off ventilators and allowed to die. In a national emergency, he said, "Families are going to be told, 'We have to take your loved one off the ventilator even though, if we could keep him on it for a week, he might be fine,' " he went on.


The challenge is clear - build a low-cost, low-power ventilator for use in rural or peri-urban areas. Think about the technologies and the engineering concepts around management of patients and design your ventilator accordingly. Small details like automatic sensing of various gases instead of having to do manual adjusting make a difference in a life-death scenario. Think about the features you would include or exclude in order to keep it affordable.



II. Detection of Heart Failure and Critical Care monitoring

About 310,000 people a year die of coronary heart disease without being hospitalized or admitted to an emergency room. Brain death and permanent death start to occur in just four to six minutes after someone experiences cardiac arrest. Sudden cardiac death from coronary heart disease occurs over 1000 times/day in India. The risk in adults is estimated to be about 1 per 1,000 adults 35 years of age and older per year.


Your challenge is to build a small device that could be worn by elderly people. This device should be able to collect ECG data and if the person has a heart-attack or arrhythmia, it should send an SMS to a doctor/family member. A variation on this might be that it actually sends a few ECG traces to the doctor on his PDA so that he could actually look at the ECG and decide what action to take.



III. Ultra Sonic Vein-finder

Everyday, more than 50,000 nurses give more than 1 million injections to patients from all walks of life. Besides this, there are several thousand incidences where a nurse needs to place an IV line in a person's vein or take a blood draw. All these ubiquitous medical applications require a health professional to quickly locate a vein and access it.


Your challenge is to create a system for a person to quickly find and access a vein.



IV. Automatic Detection of Falls in the elderly

The number of persons above the age of 60 years is fast growing, especially in India. India as the second most populous country in the world has 76.6 million people at or over the age of 60, constituting above 7.7% of total population. The problems faced by this segment of the population are numerous owing to the social and cultural changes that are taking place within the Indian society. Falls are one of the major problems in the elderly. Recurrent falls are an important cause of morbidity and mortality in the elderly and often slip below the radar because they do not seem as visible as "big" killers like heart disease, kidney failure and diabetes. In India, it is estimated that 1.5-2 million people die annually due to trauma caused by a fall.


Falls are the leading cause of injury-related visits to emergency departments and the primary aetiology of accidental deaths in persons over the age of 65 years. The mortality rate for falls increases dramatically with age in both sexes and in all racial and ethnic groups, with falls accounting for 70 percent of accidental deaths in persons 75 years of age and older. Falls can be markers of poor health and declining function, and they are often associated with significant morbidity. More than 90 percent of hip fractures occur as a result of falls, with most of these fractures occurring in persons over 70 years of age. One third of community-dwelling elderly persons and 60 percent of nursing home residents fall each year. Risk factors for falls in the elderly include increasing age, medication use, cognitive impairment and sensory deficits. (Am Fam Physician 2000; 61:2159-68,2173-4).


Your challenge is to develop an instrument or a device that can detect if a person has a fall and then send an SMS to relatives. For eg. A person may be walking down slippery stairs in the monsoon, and have a fall. Your device would have to detect this and be able to send out a signal for help. Think about the different scenarios where this could be used and also think about the design and form factor of your device:

  • Would you put it around a person's foot? Could it be voice-activated?
  • Would it generate too many false alarms?
  • What if the person fell, hit their head and was unconscious?
  • Is the location of the fall important? ( stairs? bathroom?) Do you have a specific location-dependent solution?


V. Innovate and Create

You can also develop any device that you think can change the future of Healthcare and Bio-medical fields.
The problem statements mentioned above, should be taken as starting points in the innovation process. We want you to feel free to innovate in areas wherever you see a compelling need that could impact a person's health.

For example, taking the needs above and extrapolating them could yield the following:


  1. By looking at the need for ventilators and medical innovation in rural areas, you might think of a need for affordable oxygen. Develop a method where a rural hospital could generate oxygen and store it safely. This would enable rural hospitals to have year-round supply of oxygen and would likely save many millions of lives.
  2. By thinking about monitoring for a heart attack, you might think about patient monitoring in general and think about developing a cheap, affordable patient monitor and integrating it with wireless technology so that one doctor can monitor 20-30 patients.
  3. By thinking about detection of falls, you might think about rehabilitation after a fall or prevention of a fall in the first place.
  4. By thinking about looking for veins, you might think about painless injections or delivery of drugs to various parts in the body. Or you may think about injection-less vaccines for children. In areas where there are high incidences of HIV, there might be value in developing "prick-free" technologies or inhalable vaccines.
  5. Develop non invasive blood monitoring systems for parameters like glucose, urea, haemoglobin, lipids etc.
  6. Design newer pulse monitoring devices.
  7. Develop a wheel chair having capability of climbing staircase.
  8. Develop wearable medical sensors.
  9. Develop devices and systems for the advancement of rural healthcare.
  10. Healthcare IT:
    • Provide a system that enables multiple physicians to engage in a remote consultation at the same time. They should all be able to look at a patient's record, make notes, ideally "see" each other and/or the patient.
    • The system should allow them to look back at the patients' medical records.
    • The system should have the ability to quickly view imaging data from X-ray, MRI or CT. For images that are 3D (or able to be rendered in 3D) a user should be able to rotate the images and highlight features on the image that might be good regions of interest to focus on.
    • The system should be able to transmit the images and video fast and have optimal compression.
    • The system should be scaleable and secure.
    • Ability to have continuous dictation and transcription - the physician users would speak and it would transcribe the diagnosis.
    • Ability to do some intelligent data mining. As the system grows and expands, it would be good to be able to mine the data and tag it. For instance, a particular type of image may be associated with a certain diagnosis. It would be good to have a way for the system to "learn" this (from the physician input or from embedded tags that the physician uses) and then start making some recommendations.

  11. Kidney Failure: Design a home kit that would enable the following: encourage diet modification, provide cheap, regular BP measurement, easy-to-use urinalysis devices that enable fast measurement of serum creatinine/albumin, estimates of the glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) using several known mathematical formulae (eg. Cockcroft and Gault) and an anemia sensor (optical) to monitor the red blood cell count.
  12. In cancer surgeries, to reduce the risk of recurrence, surgeons often remove some portion of the healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. It would be beneficial to have a tool that can help the surgeon to assess the tumor boundaries intra-operatively. This can potentially reduce the amount of surrounding healthy tissue that needs to be removed, in-turn reducing the collateral damage.
  13. While performing any invasive activity, it is important for the medical practitioner to have knowledge of internal anatomy (arteries, veins, other vessels & ducts, etc) of an organ or a body part. Current techniques like ultrasound, CT scan, etc, try to provide not so usable solutions for the same. Design a system that would provide real time and on-site visualization of internal anatomy so that medical practitioners get an idea of what lies inside before they take any invasive step (surgical or non-surgical).

These are just examples to help you. You do not have to limit yourself to these problem statements. You can make your own device for the betterment of healthcare and life sciences.


View the Competition Structure »


Stages Duration What the participant has to do
Abstract Stage October 12th Submit an abstract containing the initial idea and a plan of action
Model Making Stage October 25th - December 5th Make a model based on the initial idea
Working Solution December 5th - January 22nd Work on the model so that it becomes a solution which can be implemented
Finals January 24th - 26th Display the final solution

Those participants who are not able to submit their abstracts by 12th October 2008 can still take part by sending us a detailed technical report by 5th December 2008 (which is the last date for registration).


2.1 Abstract Submission

All the abstracts submitted will be screened and those, whose ideas are shortlisted, would be provided with mentors, who would be of immense help in carving your brainchild into a solution, by providing you with guidance at each step. As a result, your solution might get implemented throughout the country and making you a national figure.


  • The last date for submitting the abstract is 12th October 2008.
  • The write-ups should be mailed to prayaas@techfest.org with the subject "Prayaas: Elixir 2.0 write-up Reg. No. -------". Please do not forget to mention your registration number in your abstract while sending it.
  • There is no restriction on the length of the abstract, however the following points must be addressed to in the abstract :
    1. The uniqueness of your idea.
    2. A plan of action for the implementation of your idea and how the implementation it is to be realized in practice.
    3. It is recommended that vital aspects of the project that require special focus are mentioned explicitly (Provide a detailed description showing illustrations, figures, data to backup your statements. Design rationale - you must provide a lot of depth here. Any results obtained or simulations run should be provided with explanation).
    4. Graphical and pictorial representation of data is encouraged.
    5. We would welcome statistical data in your abstract, however we emphasize that you specify the source of your data as well.
    6. Also the abstract should be as brief as possible.
    7. It is advisable for a participant to emphasize on those points in the abstract which satisfy the judging criteria of the final round, if possible.
    8. Authentic data to show the amount of work that has already been done in the particular field is welcome.
  • The names of the shortlisted participants will be available on the website by 27th October 2008.

2.2 Model Presentation (Round 1)

After the short listing, participants will have to make a physical model for the solution, which will be reviewed in this stage. The participants will be required to submit a technical report and a video to demonstrate the progress made on their working model. The last date for the submission of the technical report and the video is 5th December 2008. The panel of judges will analyze the report and the video and will give them a detailed feedback as to how the model can be modified to achieve a better solution. The participants will recieve the feedback by 12th December 2008. Further details on this round will be given soon. The best models would be given prizes.


The report and the video should be mailed by post to the following address:
TECHFEST 2009
Students' Gymkhana,
IIT Bombay, Powai
Mumbai- 400076


Those participants who have not been selected after the abstract stage can come to IIT Bombay on November 29-30, 2008 along with a detailed abstract and model. Any participant who was not shortlisted at the abstract stage can be provided with mentorship subject to judges' decision.


2.3 The Finals

After Round One (model presentation stage) the participant will make a working prototype of the solution. The teams will have to bring their prototypes to be judged and showcased at Techfest 2009.

Those teams who did not present their models at round 1, have to bring their abstracts and the models to IIT Bombay by 5th December, before they can participate in the final round.

No new entries will be entertained after December 5th.

The final solution would be judged on the following criteria

  1. Practicality of the idea.
  2. Implement ability of the product.
  3. Cost efficiency.
  4. User friendliness of the product.
  5. Conditions and the feasibility under which your solution can be implemented.
  6. Marketability of the product.


View the Rules »


3.1 General Rules

  1. The participating entries must be in a team of a maximum six people. If the participating team feels that their idea requires more participants to in their team, they can forward their request, with suitable reasons, to prayaas@techfest.org with the subject "Elixir 2.0 team number increase".
  2. The competition is open to all (student, research scholars and professionals).
  3. Every team has to register online at our website for the competition. A registration number will be allocated to the team on registration which shall be used for future reference.
  4. A team can participate at any point of time before 30th November. However, the abstracts submitted before 12th October 2008 would be considered for mentorship. Teams which submit their abstracts at a later stage would be provided with mentors only if their idea is exceptionally good.
  5. Judges decision shall be treated as final and binding on all.
  6. Note that at any point of time the latest information will be that on the site. The information provided in the pdf downloaded earlier may not be the latest. However, registered participants will be informed through mail about any changes on the site.

For International Participants: All International Participants will have to register before November 30th 2008, and will have to submit the videos of their models along with an abstract before December 5th 2008. The shortlisted international team details will be put up on the website by 10th December 2008.


3.2 Certificate Policy

Those participants whose ideas and plan of action are recommended by the judges on the basis of their ability to get implemented will be provided with certificate of participation.

The top entries from this event would be provided with certificate of excellence.


3.3 Team Specification

The participating entries must be in a team of a maximum six people. If the participating team feels that their idea requires more participants to in their team, they can forward their request, with suitable reasons, to prayaas@techfest.org with the subject "Elixir 2.0 team number increase".


3.4 Registration

Registrations for Elixir 2.0 have started. To register, click here.


View the Resources »