Description
SensUs is a Student Competition to stimulate the development of biosensors in a friendly competitive manner whereby students make and design innovative biosensors. Each year, a societally impactful indicator of health is chosen as objective in collaboration with different stakeholders. The first edition was organized in 2016 with 5 university teams participating. Ever since, SensUs has grown and innovated to further boost its mission. In 2018 an entrepreneurial training program was included as the biosensors developed by the students were very promising and had true commercial potential. To better prepare the students for a potential commercialization of their biosensor invention, the entrepreneurship training was added. Five year later, it has become clear that SensUs offers the ideal platform to foster entrepreneurial activity around biosensor. Since 2020 also an Express Venture Building Program has been added, organized by HighTechXL an renowned deep-tech accelerator, to further stimulate entrepreneurship.
SensUs aims to raise awareness about the possibilities that biosensing can offer to the life of patients and to health care in general. To spread this awareness on a worldwide scale, an online platform enables everybody from all over the world to view and experience the SensUs Contest. The competition is organized by professors and students from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. During the latest edition (2020), 17 teams of engineering students from different universities competed for four awards (i.e. analytical performance, creativity, translational potential, and public inspiration). The recruitment of contest participants centered around team composition and backgrounds which are interdisciplinary and complement each other in order to ensure a high-level skill set for developing innovative solutions that, besides technological maturity, also match current market needs.
