The Uganda Industrial Research Institute (UIRI), together with the African Biomedical Engineering Consortium (ABEC) and the UBORA consortium, is holding the 2019 ABEC Design Competition with the theme ‘Cross-Cutting Issues in Healthcare: Global Technology Innovations in Surgery, Obstetrics and Anesthesia’. This competition seeks innovative multidisciplinary ideas, overlapping engineering and medicine paradigms, from student teams. The sought ideas should tackle global challenges associated with surgical practice, obstetrics and anesthesia with an emphasis on low- and middle-income countries. Sustainable solutions can only be developed if engineers engage collaboratively with those at the forefront of delivering healthcare.

Successful teams emerging from the design competition will have one team member invited to a  one-week design school featuring an innovative Conceive Design Implement Operate (CDIO) instructional framework empowered by the OBORA an e-infrastructure for the co-design of open-source medical devices.

 It is a two-stage competition: the first-stage deadline is on April 1st 2019.