EUREKA Innovation Award for a Swiss-led project

Eurostars is a European funding programme, founded by EUREKA member countries and the European Union through Horizon 2020. Eurostars is specifically dedicated to stimulating translational innovation projects of small and medium enterprises developing innovative products, processes or services. The submitted projects were rated basing on a criteria of four key factors: Cooperation, technological novelty and degree of innovation, economic success, and societal/environmental benefits.

Opto-Brain, a project of NeMoDevices, was announced the winner of the EUREKA Innovation Award 2015/2016 in the category ‘Innovators of Tomorrow. This award is handed over to a project which most successfully implements a promising new and disruptive technology with a clear economic, societal and environmental impact compared to existing solutions. Emanuela Keller (photo), Founder of NeMoDevices and scientific coordinator of the Opto-Brain Project will present the winning project at the upcoming EUREKA Innovation Week, April 26-29, 2016, in Stockholm. The project will receive a prize of worth 16’000 Euro as a token of appreciation and acknowledgement for the hard work invested in the project.

Opto-Brain: The revived neuromonitoring system
In 2011 NeMoDevices, a startup dedicated to optimizing diagnosis and treatment of patients with stroke and brain injuries, was contracted to run the project, “Opto-Brain”, a new multi-parameter neuromonitoring system to save patients` lives in stroke, brain injury, cardiac arrest and sleep apnea. Therefore, the novel system will strengthen diagnosis, monitoring and prognosis of stroke easier, faster and more accurate thus improving the health and quality of life of European citizens and also promote development in photonics for life science markets in Europe.

Jeanette Müller, CEO at Accelopment, a service provider specialising in European research, development and innovation support programmes including Horizon 2020 and EUREKA/Eurostars, worked closely with Emanuela Keller, CEO of NemoDevices on the proposal for Opto-Brain. This included supporting NeMoDeivces and the other project partners on administrative, financial and reporting tasks as part of the project management. The project officially commenced in 2012 and was successfully finalised in 2013 with a total cost of up to 2.5 million Euros. This success is also owed to the contribution of the other of participants from Europe including Universitätsklinik Für Neurochirurgie, Medizinische Universität Graz in Austria, Universität Freiburg in Germany, Use-lab Gmbh, from Germany and Creaholic Sa from Switzerland.

About NeMoDevices
NeMoDevices was established as a spin-off company from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. The startup is dedicated to optimizing diagnosis and treatment of patients with stroke and brain injuries in order to save and improve life and life quality.

About EUREKA and Eurostars
Eurostars is a joint programme between EUREKA and the European Commission, co-funded from the national budgets of 34 Eurostars Participating States and Partner Countries and by the European Union through Horizon 2020.The goal of EUREKA is to raise the productivity and competitiveness of European businesses through technology, boosting national economies on the international market, and strengthening the basis for sustainable prosperity and employment.

(Photo: Emanuela Keller)

(RAN)