Students' Research Project Becomes Award-Winning Device at UPitch Contest
In 2019, Owais Aftab was in search of a summer research project to meet his degree requirements for independent study. The biomedical engineering/pre-health Albert Dorman Honors College scholar, then a first-year student, found what he was looking for after a conversation with one of his teachers, John Vito d'Antonio-Bertagnolli ’16, M.S. ’17.
D’Antonio-Bertagnolli introduced Aftab to Antje Ihlefeld, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and director of NJIT’s Neural Engineering for Speech and Hearing Laboratory, who had a project involving a screening device focused on auditory processing disorder (APD), a clinical condition in which speech comprehension is diminished despite otherwise normal hearing. Aftab started prototyping the mobile device, now called MAPD, and continued working on it through the fall semester.
Fast forward to this past May and Aftab was the entrepreneurial lead presenting MAPD, which translates research findings into clinical practice, to a panel of judges at the annual UPitch competition for college entrepreneurs. MAPD won the “Best Early Stage Startup” award and received a $1,500 cash prize — an honor that followed its recent win at NJIT’s New Business Model Competition, a significant grant from New Jersey Health Foundation and support from the National Science Foundation I-Corps program.
“We’re trying to gauge the … ability of a person’s central nervous system to process sound. MAPD consists of a battery of tests, so for example, sound localization is one of the tasks that is evaluated. There’s also, for example, speech comprehension testing in different environments. … If we test different types of background sound, how well a person can understand speech can be a useful piece of information,” Aftab explained about the development team’s objective with the device. (The team also includes co-lead Sravana Nuti, a second-year biomedical engineering major/computer science minor and Honors scholar; AKM Islam, a May 2020 information technology graduate who minored in computer science, applied statistics, and philosophy and applied ethics; and Adolfo Nakamura, a mathematics and computer science student from Rutgers University-Newark.)
According to prominent audiology researcher Brent Edwards, more than 25 million Americans have difficulty hearing in crowded places even though their ears appear healthy, a hallmark of APD. Tests for the disorder are subjective and nonstandardized, and tend to be time-consuming and costly. And there are a lot of them — some 20 tests currently make up the condition’s diagnostic battery.
Ihlefeld has conducted auditory research for the past 20 years and knew a comprehensive, reliable screening tool was needed. “Antje is phenomenal,” said Aftab. “It was really, really an intuitive thing for her to say there’s no effective way that people can do these tests well. … There’s a lack of scalability.”
As a part of the NSF I-Corps site grant, the team interviewed potential customers, including audiologists, and applied what they learned to the development of the device, which possesses three significant capabilities: automated testing, extensive test suites in multiple languages and sensitivity tests for temporal resolution (the ability to discern the time between sounds), spectral resolution (the ability to discern different frequencies) and spatial resolution (the ability to discern different sound locations). MAPD would save practitioners significant time related to testing, the team says.
The Road to UPitch Victory
Founded in 2016 by Susan Scherreik of Seton Hall’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, and sponsored by the New Jersey Collegiate Entrepreneurship Consortium, UPitch both encourages and spotlights college entrepreneurs. At its annual competition, undergraduate student teams present their startup ideas to an independent panel of judges that evaluates them based on innovativeness and execution along with a written executive summary and oral demonstration.
The MAPD team received valuable guidance in honing its business model, structuring its allotted five-minute pitch and developing a presentation for the competition from NJIT faculty and staff well versed in entrepreneurship and commercialization: Mike Ehrlich, co-director of the New Jersey Innovation Acceleration Center, housed at NJIT; Cesar Bandera, associate professor of entrepreneurship, who also served as the team’s adviser; and Will Lutz, the general manager of entrepreneurship at NJIT’s New Jersey Innovation Institute and director of commercialization at VentureLink, the university’s community business incubator. It also benefited greatly from mentorship in research commercialization from the New Jersey Health Foundation.
“What attracted me to the MAPD project was the students’ comprehensive approach,” noted Bandera. “The team was addressing a truly significant health problem, developing an innovative technological solution, and pursuing a business strategy that ensures the innovation reaches the people it is intended to help.”
This year UPitch went virtual, as many other events have during the coronavirus pandemic. But it did enable the six 2020 finalists to be mentored individually in the preceding months by corporate executives and research scientists from Nokia Bell Labs, which provided the prize money and judges, and hosted the livestream. Peter Vetter, head of the company’s Fixed Networks Research Program, worked closely with Aftab in refining the MAPD pitch.
In his presentation, Aftab included a video explaining how the sensitivity tests would function — on a calibrated iPad screen with an x-axis indicating the sound location and a y-axis linked to pitch, a person with hearing impairment would move an icon according to where he/she thinks a sound is emanating from and when, as well as how high-pitched or low-pitched it is.
When Marcus Weldon, Nokia Bell Labs president and corporate chief technology officer, announced that MAPD had won “Best Early Stage Startup,” Aftab’s first response was one of disbelief. “When I worked on it last summer, I never would have imagined that we’d end up here,” he shared. “… It’s not even been a full year since I’ve been working on this project and we made so much progress in terms of being able to communicate the idea clearly … and, of course, actually having a prototype that we’ve been developing.”
Next steps for MAPD include further advancing the prototype with an eye toward interfacing with electronic health records and incorporating treatment protocols.
“We faculty are always delighted when students take their work outside the classroom and engage the broader community,” Bandera remarked. “The perseverance of everyone involved — particularly the students but also the faculty and competition organizers — was inspiring.”
“As a scientist, it is very rewarding to mentor the next generation and to lean on the expertise NJIT provides for translating research insight from bench to bedside,” added Ihlefeld. “The support we have received from NJIT’s business and innovation community as well as from our other wonderful mentors is outstanding. I look forward to many more translational student entrepreneurship projects that will benefit from NJIT’s excellent infrastructure.”
