This term, the new ETH Zurich lecture “Developing Digital Biomarkers” was launched. Dr. Filipe Barata designed and taught the course and was supported throughout by Research Assistants Patrick Langer, Jinjoo Shim and Fan Wu. The course is targeted at students with a technical background who are interested in healthcare.

One of the course’s assignments was titled “Propose your own Digital Biomarker” and aimed to connect to applications and the digital health industry. In this challenge, students formed small groups and researched and proposed a novel digital biomarker. To do this, students were encouraged to either try to think of how a novel biomarker could be digitized, or to focus on the current standard of care and to think about how consumer-centric devices could help people monitor their health state digitally. Students were instructed to prepare a presentation on their results and to consider how the digital biomarker would be tested and and how the technology might be scaled up in a cost-effective manner.

On 8 and 15 December students presented their results to a panel of experts including the several professionals from digital health start-ups.

The winners of the first presentation date were students Josephine Becker, Conrad McCarthy, and Nikolaus von Moos. Their presentations were judged Michel Wältli (IDUN), Jan-Niklas Kramer (CSS) and Soumya Dash (Sleepiz).

On the second presentation day, the following students came first: Isha Gupta, Joel Reischmann, and Ines Diaz. Presentations were evaluated by Peter Tinschert (Resmonics) and George Chatzipirpiridis (Magnes).

Below are some photos of the groups who came fist in the group presentations.

If you’re an ETH student and interested in attending this innovative course next year, have a look a the course description to see if you might be able to register for it!