Named as one of 6 teams to receive funding in order to bring research project to market.
Khalifa University faculty members Dr. Ahsan Khandoker and Dr. Hani Saleh were recently named as one of six teams to win Qatar’s Challenge 22 a legacy initiative for the 2022 World Cup. Their winning idea is a device that monitors safe exercise for athletes and non-athletes alike. They were chosen out of 330 applicants from around the GCC and were the only team from the UAE to win. The team received USD 20 000 as well as the opportunity to work with mentors in their field of interest develop their idea into a prototype and ultimately the chance to showcase their ideas on a global platform.
Their idea stems from the need to monitor peoples’ exercise habits as over exercise can lead to severe injuries that sometimes requires months to recover and may even cause sudden cardiac death. Currently there are no safe ways outside of a laboratory environment to monitor exercise intensity for high risk patients and athletes. They proposed a wearable wrist band that reads a person’s heart rate breathing rate body temperature blood oxygen level and physical activity level along with environment temperature humidity and personal physiological profile. This information is then fed into a unique predictive model that determines the safe exercise intensity limit and alerts the user when it’s been passed.
The proposed device can be used by people with sedentary lifestyle wanting to get back into a healthy lifestyle people with cardiovascular risk such as diabetes obesity hypertension and even elite athletes.
Another Khalifa University team consisting of Dr. Nelson King Dr. Raja Jayaraman Dr. Yousef Iraqi and Dr. Nawaf Almoosa were also named among the 18 semi-finalists invited to present their research titled: “Where is my guide? A system for providing real and virtual venue assistance” in Qatar.
“We are very pleased with our faculty’s win in Qatar ” said Dr. Tod Laursen Khalifa University’s President. “This is an excellent opportunity for them to develop and market new technology aimed at helping people lead healthier lives. We encourage our faculty to explore projects that can enhance the wellbeing of the UAE’s citizens and society as a whole and technology focused on encouraging physical fitness and providing people with information about healthy physical activity is very important in today’s society.”
