ELEC 419: Innovation Lab for Mobile Health
Mayank Kumar, Graduate Student (ECE)
Peter Washington, Senior (CS, Spring'14 class member)
Synopsis: This course is an innovation lab for mobile health products. The students will organize themselves in groups with complementary skills and work on a single project for the whole semester. Following Lean Startup and Maker principles, the teams will be to develop a series of product prototypes to reach a minimum viable product to solve a real health problem. For successful projects with an operational prototype, the next steps could (i) apply to OWLspark (Rice accelerator program) (ii) raise funds via crowd-sourcing (like Kickstarter) and/or (iii) get sponsored by Scalable Health Labs. ELEC Juniors can also use the project outcomes as a starting point for their Senior Design.
Meeting time: Once a week, wednesdays 6:30-9pm.
Target audience: The course is targeted to ELEC and CS majors, both undergrads and grad students. See below for more details.
Max class size: 25 students will be accepted to the class.
Speakers for Spring 2014
- Ankit Mohan, Flutter (recently acquired by Google)
- Oliver Cossairt, Northwestern University
Confirmed Speakers for Spring 2015 (more to come)
- Mark Ziats, Creative Bioinformatics (Feb 18, 2015)
- Hamid Schricker, MedHelp (later stage, recently acquired)
- Siddharth Satish, Gauss Surgical (several rounds of funding)
- Gaurav Patel, Cognita Labs (early stage)
About projects:
- All projects will involve mobile/web programming and potentially hardware development.
- All projects will be a solution or part of a solution for a health problem.
- To get a sense of projects, see projects from the first session of the class Spring 2014 Session.
- What kind of projects? The projects are quite diverse. Examples lined for this year include, an automated method to teach correct weightlifting technique, gamifying Rice gym, tremor estimation for Parkinson's, an electronic flute for breathing exercises, designing a campus-wide mobile game to promote regular exercise on Rice campus, social games to improve recovery from chemotherapy, monitoring TV viewing to promote regular activity and developing 3D imaging using smartphone cameras.
- This class is the most "uncourse"-like course in ECE. It will expose you to the uncertainty of finding the right solutions. Your tinkering, experimenting, rapid prototyping, iterating side of the brain will be heavily exercised.
- If you dive into it with full heart, this course will make you brave. You will have to talk to real customers, learn to listen to them, understand their true problems, and then be compassionate about their concerns. Of course, you will build real operational product prototypes to solve their problems.
- Real engineering is challenging. You will get a taste of it in this course.
- We plan to invite speakers from startups and established companies (see list above). You will have an opportunity, first hand, to hear what it takes to build a company and how best to do it.
- If you decide to enroll, come with an open mind and a strong passion to learn. You will surprise yourself by recognizing skills you thought you did not have.
- We learnt a lot from the first session of the class held in Spring 2014. We were lucky to have some of the best ECE/CS and one non-engineering major enroll in our class. The new version of the course is based on our experiences.
- As one major addition this year, the course curricula will include elements from Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad.