Winners of the 2016 BCITS Student Design Competition

The 2016 BCITS Student Design Competition was held at BCIT on April 6th, 2016. In attendance were BCITS staff, BCIT faculty, and biomedical/assistive technology professionals from the community, who were all treated to an afternoon of outstandingly innovative projects and presentations from the 5 teams of students who took part in the event.

To digress just a little, in the fall of 2015, BCITS and BCIT staff/faculty met to discuss projects that may be of value to the assistive technology field, and projects that would be beneficial for the BCIT Biomedical Engineering students to tackle during their 4th semester project course. A number of projects were deemed appropriate and beneficial to the assistive technology community…these projects were based on projects started in previous years or on ideas put forth by BCITS staff, including projects from the BCITS survey’s “Dream TIL” section.

Teams then took these project ideas, or their own ideas, and completed projects during their final semester. The teams that were interested in the BCITS Design Competition then worked with BCITS staff and peers to advance their projects during the 3 month period. For a list of projects, please see the article “Design Competition Teams”.

2016 BCITS Design Competition Winners

Back to the competition…the teams presented their projects and answered any questions the judges or attendees had for them. Upon completion of all presentations, the judges had a difficult time sorting out who would win the event, with so many strong projects. After some time, the judges completed deliberating and decided on the list of winners for the event.

• 1st Place – SmarLift
• 2nd Place – The Wizard
• Honourable Mention – EasyFlip 2.0
• Honourable Mention – Wall-E Jr.