A former Dundee medical student is hoping for a business breakthrough after designing a life-saving wristband.
Chris McCann’s device tracks changes in patients’ vital signs and sends out an SOS if it detects indications of heart attacks, strokes or other serious illness.
The messages are transmitted to monitors alerting medical staff who can quickly intervene.
As well as saving lives, the wristband aims to help cut the number of unnecessary hospital admissions, reducing NHS waiting times and bed-blocking.
Chris, 25, from Paisley, came up with the idea as a third-year medical student at Dundee University when involved in the care of patients whose health had deteriorated because warning signs were not recognised early enough.
“I thought ‘let’s do something to solve this’, so I started snap40, using knowledge in computing science and software engineering to develop the idea,” Chris said.
His work led him to a £40,000 prize at the ScotEdge awards, a Dragons’ Den-style business competition backed by Scots entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter.
Chris also won the Young Innovators Challenge and the first prize of £10,000 in the Scottish Institute of Enterprise’s New Ventures Competition.
SIE is funded by the Scottish Funding Council and Scottish Enterprise to help students develop enterprise skills and start up their own ventures.
Chris has gone on to raise £450,000 to get the product to market.
He has mapped out three stages in the journey to reach that destination in 2016.
“First we are putting the device out for study with volunteers at the University of West of Scotland in January,” he said.
“Next there will be clinical trials with a health authority which will probably be in August.
“All going well, we are then looking at manufacture, hopefully in Scotland, and sale of the product which we would like to do in December.”