V Bionic Wins Microsoft’s Imagine Cup 2022 for Student Inventors

The CEO and Chairman of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, announced the final judging for the 2022 Imagine Cup global winner and V Bionic took the top honors. Their platform solution, ExoHeal, combines an extensive intuitive app and a therapeutic exoskeleton hand device with sensors to create a robotic glove that helps patients with neurological damage recover faster at an affordable price option.

The team is from Saudi Arabia and was led by Zain Samdani who is a student involved in the robotics field for years. The ExoHeal glove is simply a mechanized exoskeleton developed for people with hand paralysis to experience a quicker, more comfortable, and inexpensive three-stage rehabilitation process. The machine can help improve its patients’ physical and mental health as well.

The primary focus of the team was to make the glove affordable and easy to use. Thus they stayed away from bulky and slow elements like pneumatic and hydraulic mechanisms. “Flexor linkage-driven movement gives us the flexibility to individually actuate different parts of each finger (phalanges) whilst keeping the device portable,” said Samdani. “We are currently developing our production-ready prototype that utilizes a modular design to fit the hand sizes of different patients”, he added.

Though there is a lot of work ahead for a medical device like this, in the early tests, the team found that the glove helped patients recover more quickly. The cash prize from the Imagine Cup victory will help them conduct their final clinical trials and launch in the market. Microsoft gives them $100,000 plus $50,000 in Azure credits along with a mentoring session from CEO, Satya Nadella. The team plans to target India first, as they believe that it is a high-need market with lower regulatory barriers.