Rewired @ Opportunities Fair — The Postdoc Center of the University of Cambridge
Jae-Yong Lee is an Investment Manager at Rewired.
Last week, Rewired presented at the Opportunities Fair at the Postdoc Center of the University of Cambridge. Hosted by Deep Science Ventures, the Opportunities Fair brought together scientists and experts from the fields of immunology, biotech, and robotics, including Prof. Mark Coles of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford, Nirmesh Patel of Cambridge Cancer Genomics, and neuroscientist Jason Miranda of Galvani Bioelectronics.
Rewired contributed our insights regarding human-machine interfaces for collaborative robotics as well as wearable applications, e.g. bionic arms.
The event gave entrepreneurs and researchers the opportunity to speak to Cambridge postdocs about the complex challenges they face when conducting biotech research and attempting to commercialize medical technologies. Participants remarked on urgent needs, such as for electroencephalography sensors that do not suffer from cross-talking and new approaches to stimulating internal organs for therapy.
Rewired discussed the need for an intuitive human-machine interface for surgery robotics and how to better design remote-controlled robots in hard-to-reach environments. In the lively debate that ensued, we also stressed the importance of avoiding technological perfection at the cost of lower practicality.
Consider, for example, A the design choice between a highly effective but invasive medical solution and a semi-effective but non-invasive one.
While the former may be technologically superior, the latter is better suited for broad market adoption and will likely prove to have a greater real-life impact.
At Rewired we believe in supporting technologies that set new standards for scientific achievement. At the same time, we believe that an early focus on practicality will help to ensure that more technologies emerging from research environments successfully find real-world applications and make a real-world impact.
