London neurotech hackathon 2025
On 25th and 26th of January, we started the new term on a high note by hosting our remarkable ‘London Neurotech Hackathon 👾’. As the UK’s first student-led neurotech hackathon, our society achieved another milestone 🚩 fostering collaboration and engagement among neurotech enthusiasts to drive innovation!
80+ amazing neurotech innovators gathered at the Entrepreneur First hacker-space in Shoreditch and developed creative neurotech solutions for 36-hours in teams. Our innovators worked towards one of the two challenge streams:
1. Ideation 💡: Build products, ideas, and inventions addressing real-world neurotech problems
2. Computational Neuroscience 💻: Harness machine learning and train on real sEMG data
After overnight 🌙 hacking and final presentations 🧑💼 to showcase everyone’s unique inventions, the ideas were assessed based on 1) real-world problem identification, 2) originality, 3) potential for technical/commercial success, and 4) long-term vision. The winners and runners-up were chosen thanks to the expertise of our incredible panel of judges: Katherine Jones (Hummingbird Ventures), Peter Zhegin (e184), Lucy Jung (Charco, LYEONS Neurotech), Ian Radcliffe (Imperial College Department of Bioengineering), and Sophie Valentine (NeuroTechX London).
Huge congrats to our winners 🏆 GastroMod 🏆
Led by: Federica Montrone, Ines Sebti, Jake Chatburn, and Jebastin Nadar —> Flexible electrodes inside the Gastrointestinal Tract.
and four ⭐️ runners-up ⭐️:
- ShutEye led by Emmanuel Ogunsakin, Emil Uddevik, Ashwin Bose, Sourish Sharma, and Gianni Austin —> an EEG sleep mask, with a working prototype built inside 24 hours!
- BraveSpace led by Yeline Idir, Lucía van den Boogaart Castro, Aaruni Arora, and Sam Clifford —> VR-based exposure therapy
- NanoBridge led by Monica Yi Jin Yang, Sarvin Ayangar, Daniel Reti, and Harry Allen —> stent-based neural drug delivery
- NeuronML led by KC Okolo, Tomer Epshtein, Joseph Chan, Tim West, and Joshua Ho —> middleware for neural data decoding
Thanks to everyone who participated in our event and helped make our hackathon such a rewarding and memorable experience. We were very excited to see people from diverse backgrounds and skills coming together to collaborate and bring big ideas to life. 🦾
As Imperial Neurotech Society, we encourage everyone to continue developing their invaluable idea, regardless of being a winner or not. 🚀 Please feel free to reach out to any members of our society or our project coordinator Dameer in specific, if you want to brainstorm new ideas or continue working on the original ones. Our sponsors and judges, Katherine from Hummingbird and Peter from e184, have offered their time for office hour-type meetings for those looking for advices. Furthermore, if anyone’s interested in participating in smaller-scale ‘Ideathons’ 💡, weekend-long events without the competition, please send us a message or put a message in the WhatsApp General channel and we will set it up!
Lastly, immense gratitude for our sponsors (e184, Hummingbird Ventures, Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA), and KAIKAKU) and partners (Entrepreneur First, NeuroTechX, and London Student Network) for their essential support in planning and running our hackathon smoothly! 🤝