Photo: From left: Soheil Mohammadpour Doustkouhi and Hengjie Wang
Velocity is the principal entrepreneurial development programme in New Zealand, started in 2003 and based in the School of Business. Each year, a core part of the Velocity programme is the Velocity $100k challenge competition which offers staff and students the opportunity to win a share of a prize pool valued at over $100,000.
This August, Professor Steven Dakin, Dr Phil Turnbull and PhD student Soheil Mohammadpour Doustkouhi won $1000 as a $100K Challenge Qualifier with their entry “Rapid Assessment of Vision using Eyetracking (RAVE)”. RAVE has evolved from the team’s winning entry in the Innovation Challenge 2019, and the RAVE team will compete as one of the 15 qualifier teams in the next round of the $100K challenge.
Their public disclosure summary reads “Glaucoma, the leading cause of irreversible blindness in the world, will threaten the sight of 80 million people by 2020. Visual-field tests for the diagnosis of glaucoma are demanding and not suitable for screening. We offer a low-cost, portable, rapid objective screen for glaucoma that is easy to administer.”