Competitions: Bench to Bedside, DEBUT, and RESNA
Structured, funded, deadline-driven reasons to do Phase 5 with a team and mentors. What each competition rewards, how teams form, and how to use them without letting them use you.
You are skimming: the title, the first figure, and the short version. Switch to Read in the header for the full page, or Deep to open every deep dive.
Three competitions fit this phase exactly. Each gives you a team, a mentor, a deadline, and judges who ask the questions an interviewer would. Each also has a shape that can pull a project toward what wins rather than what helps, so know the shape.
Bench to Bedside (University of Utah)
The Center for Medical Innovation’s annual medical device competition. Teams form in the fall (mixing engineering, business, and medical students is encouraged and helps), pick a clinical need, and build through the spring toward an April final with cash prizes in the tens of thousands of dollars. Judges are clinicians, engineers, and investors, and the rubric weights the need, the evidence, the regulatory and business path, and the prototype. Being on campus, it is the most accessible of the three and the best mentored. A Phase 5 project with a written need statement and an FMEA already satisfies half the rubric. What it can distort: the pull toward a fundable device over a helpful one; hold the person you built for in mind.
NIH DEBUT
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering’s undergraduate design challenge. Teams submit a report and a video by late spring; prizes are cash and a trip to the BMES meeting. It rewards significance of the problem, the design’s technical merit, and, in specific prize categories, health equity and low-cost solutions. A Phase 5 assistive project aimed at a real, under-served need fits well. What it can distort: the video; make the demonstration honest.
RESNA Student Design Competition
The Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society’s competition, specifically for assistive technology, with finalists presenting at the annual conference in summer. Judged by people who work in assistive technology daily, so the questions are practical: does the user want it, does it survive real use, how much does it cost, who maintains it. The adaptive controller, the speller, and the haptic feedback project all fit. What it can distort: very little; this is the competition whose values match this phase.
How to use them
Form the team around the person and the need, not around the competition. Use the competition’s deadlines as your build schedule and its rubric as a checklist of documents you should write anyway. Present honestly: what works, what does not, what you measured, with the user’s words. Judges have seen a hundred overclaimed demos and remember the team that said “this failed twice and here is what we learned.” Whatever happens, the write-up, the poster, and the practiced pitch go on the portfolio.
- In September, check the dates on the calendar and confirm them on each site.
- Find one or two teammates with skills you lack (a clinical or business student).
- Register for Bench to Bedside; use its schedule for your Phase 5 project.
- Submit the same project to DEBUT in spring and RESNA if it is assistive.
- Write the reports as if they were design history file sections, because they are.