Today, at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, the winners of the first FLL Global Innovation Award will be recognized and celebrated for their innovations. The contest, which centered on a biomedical engineering theme, attracted dozens of entries from teams in 16 countries. More than 400,000 votes were cast as the public helped to narrow the field.
The overall winner was a group of girls from Iowa who developed a new type of prosthetic hand to help people with limb abnormalities hold and secure items. The team will be awarded a grant of $20,000 to apply toward patenting their invention. Runners-up from Wisconsin and Massachusetts will also be in attendance. Their inventions of a non-invasive glucose monitoring device and an unfurling bio-absorbable arterial stent were equally impressive, but lost out in the final stages of competition. All of the teams will be congratulated by David Kappos, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property at USPTO, Robert Weiss, President of the X Prize Foundation and Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST.
