Two engineering students won hackathon awards in May for quickly creating wearable medical devices at the Body Sensor Network Conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The three-day event challenged participants to come up with a working prototype on the fly. A team led by Nick Constant ’15 of West Warwick won the event’s Best Design Award with a design he dreamed up called Big Ears, a headphone-like device with sensors for monitoring a patient’s vital signs and walking gait so doctors and physical therapists can quantify a patient’s progress during rehabilitation. Cody Goldberg ’16 of Amherst, N.H., was attracted to a proposal to create a device to monitor the health of patients waiting to be seen by doctors; that team won the Best Application Award.

“Because the whole event only lasts a short time, the solution doesn’t have to look good or be fancy,” explains Constant, who begins graduate studies at URI this fall. “It just has to work.”