Thirty-one locations around Europe host this year events, for the first time in virtual format. IBEC contributed with experts, facilitators, jury, and a challenge to the workshop held in Barcelona.
Innovation Day (i-Day), an initiative of EIT Health, promotes health innovation among university students through programmes held at academic institutions around Europe. Students receive an introduction to practical health innovation tools and work in multidisciplinary teams to tackle real life health challenges posed by EIT Health projects, local organisations and private corporations. Successful teams will receive resources to develop their ideas, and students from the regions EIT Health serves will be encouraged to get involved within a network. Innovation Days are accessible to all undergraduate and postgraduate students with an interest in healthcare innovation.
I-Days educate and inspire university students to tackle Europe’s healthcare challenges
Innovation Day Barcelona 2020
I-Day Barcelona 2020, organized by StartUB from the University of Barcelona in partnership with institutions like IBEC and Hospital Clinic Barcelona, was based on a virtual escape room in which the participants completed missions to deactivate the information related to the work methodology. Through gamification, participants worked on competencies such as teamwork and personal development.
Students received an introduction to practical health innovation tools and worked in multidisciplinary teams to tackle real life health challenges posed by EIT Health projects, local organisations such as IESE, Hospital Clínic or IBEC and private corporations. Students form multidisciplinary teams counted with the guidance of the facilitators to create solutions to real life healthcare challenges. At the end of the week, the teams pitched their ideas and were judged by a panel of experts, including Eduardo Salas, Head of Technology Transfer at IBEC.
How can we tackle the negative health consequences of lockdowns in populations?
Héctor López Carral, from SPECS lab at IBEC.
Three challenges were proposed by different institutions, in particular IBEC launched the challenge: How to tackle the negative health consequences of lockdowns in populations? Héctor López Carral, from SPECS group was the expert in charge of presenting IBEC’s challenge. The other two challenges for this edition were “How to find solutions against addiction to social media and games” and “Sexual Education”.
Other IBEC members were involved in this i-Day, for instance Maria Alejandra Ortega, senior researcher at the Biosensors for Bioengineering group at IBEC participated as expert, and was in charge of helping the participants through the design thinking process. Cristina Arimany, Project Manager at the Strategic Initiatives division was a facilitator.
