Team FireHUD – Northgate graduates Zack Braun and Tyler Sisk – won the “People’s Choice” award Wednesday night in the inaugural Atlantic Coast Conference Inventure Prize.
Braun and Sisk took first place in the Georgia Tech Inventure Prize in March. Winners from the invention competitions at ACC schools then went on to compete in the ACC event.
The people’s choice award means $5,000 for Team FireHUD – on top of the $20,000 and U.S. patent that Sisk and Braun won last month.
The FireHUD is a unit that a firefighter can wear on his breathing mask. It tracks vital signs, as well as internal and external temperature, with a head’s up display. The information is also transmitted to fire department incident command.
Braun and Sisk invented the FireHUD after a discussion with a family friend of Braun’s who is a firefighter.
“We really want to thank everyone that voted for us, our family and fans,” said Braun. “We couldn’t have won the people’s choice without them.”
Braun and Sisk are currently working on making improvements to the FireHUD and writing their patent application.
First prize in the ACC competition went to Duke University’s BioMetrix. BioMetrix is an “insight driven training and rehabilitation solution” which uses a skin-adhered wearable, mobile app and cloud services to track rehabilitation progress, assess injury risk and provide real-time feedback to reduce athletic injury during training and gameplay.
Second place went to Team Contraline from the University of Virginia. Contraline is a long-lasting, non-hormonal and reversible contraceptive for men. It’s a gel that blocks sperm, and can be inserted, imaged and reversed non-surgically using an ultrasound.
