Students in the Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management Win Y-Prize

A team of three students in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management (LSM) have won the 2023 Penn Y-Prize Competition, a contest in which members of the Penn community compete to propose the best commercial applications for an emerging technology.

The winning team, Equimeter, consists of sophomore LSM students Ujjayi Pamidigantam, Parthiv Patel, and Advait Thaploo. They won for their use of physics-informed neural network (PINN) technology to improve pulse oximetry in patients with darker skin.

A pulse oximeter is a small device that clips to a patient’s finger to measure blood oxygen level. It works via an equation that relates the intensity of light passing through the patient’s finger to their blood oxygen level. However, patients with darker skin experience lower average levels of light intensity traveling through the finger, and the equations in pulse oximeter machines currently do not account for this difference. This can lead to unnecessary testing, as well as racial disparities in treatment and outcomes. Equimeter solves this problem by using the PINN model to adjust for this difference and enabling patients of diverse skin colors to be graded by an algorithm specially adjusted to their skin color.
 
The Equimeter team was awarded $10,000, and their proposal was automatically entered into the semi-final round of the Penn Venture Lab Startup Challenge.

Read the full article in the Daily Pennsylvanian.