The Grand Prize Winner is Umbulizer

©iStock/gustavofrazao

The annual MIT IDEAS Global Challenge showcase and awards ceremony recently took place.  The grand prize winner of $15,000 went to Umbulizer, a team developing a low-cost, portable ventilator — made by modifying and simplifying the machinery — for patients in rural areas where medical resources are scarce and unreliable.

“High-end ventilators are not affordable for hospitals in Pakistan. We’ve basically simplified the model” to make them less expensive, team member Moiz Imam, a senior in mechanical engineering, told MIT News.

The Umbulizer team — including Sanchay Gupta, a Harvard Medical School student, and Hamza Khan, a Harvard Business School student — is developing an automated ventilator that keeps only four critical functions, reducing the price to around $2,000.

Learn more about Umbulizer and read the entire article to discover all the inventions with social impact that won awards at the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge.  Congrats to Umbulizer!