The Sonavi Labs team is excited to announce that the Feelix platform has been selected as a winner of the MIT – Solve Tiger Challenge, sponsored by the TigerIT Foundation. The competition received hundreds of applications from all over the world, with 3 Bangladesh based companies and 3 international companies winning the award.

Chief Technology Officer, Ian McLane represented the company in the challenge finals, which were held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on December 11th. Dozens of teams from around the world submitted solutions for the Tiger Challenge, which seeks to support innovations that will have significant impacts in Bangladesh.

Sonavi Labs has spent years developing the Feelix platform with help and feedback provided by clinicians, researchers and Community Health Workers in Bangladesh. The team has worked with icddr,b and Projahnmo to conduct currently on-going clinical trials and research.

The Sonavi Labs team is excited about the challenge win because it will support a new collaboration with Dr. Taufiq Hasan, founder of the mHealth Lab at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). The team at BUET will be taking on the challenge of applying the Feelix technology to the classification of heart sounds.

While in Bangladesh, McLane also made a trip to visit clinical sites in Sylhet, where the Feelix device has been used by Community Health Workers to support patients in the more rural areas of the region. McLane has been working with clinicians in Bangladesh for several years, since the start of the PERCH study, which created the foundational database for the development of the Feelix technology. In a statement after the announcement of the competition results, he explained, “The Bangladesh Ministry of Health was, in fact, Sonavi Labs first paying customer, so to win this competition in Dhaka feels serendipitous.”