Recent Alum’s Company Sponsors Third Capstone Project
Simon Tecle and Kirsten Bassett, UA engineering alums and co-founders at Jackson Medical Solutions, recruit students to participate in the Interdisciplinary Capstone project the company is sponsoring this year.
Jackson Medical Solutions has come full circle. The company, started by 2019 biomedical engineering alum Ian Jackson the year he graduated, is now sponsoring its third Interdisciplinary Capstone Project.
“I really believe in the capstone program. The outcomes speak for themselves,” Jackson said.
Jackson expects the company’s first product, the OracleTM smart bed, to come to market in around a year. One of the teams Jackson Medical sponsored for the 2020-2021 academic year built the product’s prototype and began putting OracleTM on the road to commercialization.
Ian Jackson
This year’s project tasks a team with building a mixed reality diagnostic and treatment system. Team 23083 will design software to diagnose and treat certain medical conditions, which will require detection of changes in users’ physiology.
The expected outcome is that Design Day 2023 attendees will don a Microsoft HoloLens 2 – an untethered augmented reality headset – and receive a tutorial of the types of treatments patients experience when diagnosed with the medical conditions within the scope of the project. The team will also produce a video or photos to portray what the patient sees and how the user interfacing design assists the patient in a walkthrough of the diagnosis and treatment of specific medical conditions.
A Personal Impetus
Jackson Medical – for which Jackson has pulled many of his staff of five full-time employees and eight interns from the UA – creates sensing technologies for patient monitoring and treatment. The technology identifies vulnerable regions of the body, assigns risk and relieves pressure from bedsores.
Jackson started his company and created the OracleTM for personal reasons. As a senior in 2018, Jackson was hit by a car while riding his motorcycle. He suffered extensive injuries, requiring a foot reconstruction and experiencing a bedsore while in the hospital.
The company relocated to Phoenix in May 2022 and continues to develop software to predict several conditions and stop them before they occur.
A Win-Win Proposition
Both sponsors and students benefit from participating in the program. Jackson Medical co-founder Kirsten Bassett, graduated with a UA bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering in 2021 and a master’s in 2022. She worked on the other capstone project the company sponsored her senior year, to create a urinary catheter with an improved design.
“It’s really rewarding, because we get to come back and work with our alma mater, and we’re able to be involved in the learning process of students in our exact same footsteps of only two years ago,” Bassett said.
She said the Interdisciplinary Capstone program greatly enriches students’ education.
“It’s a win-win situation because we’re looking to not only give them that environment where they can fail safely or succeed and be celebrated but also collaborate and continue our relationship with the University of Arizona,” Bassett said.
“We’re super excited and enthralled at the prospect of working with some of these brilliant engineers."