Engineering startup Stride Tech innovates for safer senior care, nabs first place at New Venture Challenge 11 Hardware Track Finals competition

This startup is walking their way to the New Venture Challenge 11 Championships stage. We're excited to announce Stride Tech as our fourth NVC 11 Championships finalist! 

After his grandmother sustained injuries from a fall and struggled back to health, Tim Visos-Ely, Stride Tech CEO and engineering plus senior, was inspired to come up with a solution for safer senior care. He and four other team members tackled this problem as part of a Mechanical Engineering Entrepreneurship Capstone course and applied for NVC 11 in the process.

Their technology, called Smart Step, is a universally attachable walker accessory that detects and corrects dangerous walker use habits and monitors walking to generate actionable insights for a physician. Data and insights from Smart Step are tracked and given to physicians using accompanying software. The software displays the user’s walking health on a live dashboard and analyzes abnormal patterns so that a physician can better treat, diagnose, and monitor their patients.

"We’ve seen firsthand how debilitating life can be after a fall, how long the recovery is, and how psychologically damaging falls can be," said Humsini Acharya, Stride Tech co-founder and engineering plus senior. "This project and company is a way we can allow seniors to feel safer and more confident with their walkers, and one day ultimately prevent falls from happening in the first place."

Competing against seven teams in the NVC 11 Hardware Track Finals competition (hosted by the College of Engineering and Applied Science), Stride Tech took home the first place prize and $5,000 after pitching their business idea to a panel of judges and 80 more in attendance.

The other Hardware Track Finalists of the night included:​

• 2nd place: Earable ($4,000) – the world’s first in ear sleep-tracking solution
• 3rd place: Big Blue Technologies ($2,000) – building a new way to make magnesium metal using a novel reactor technology that is cleaner, greener and more energy efficient than any current production methods
• 4th place: ShineOn ($1,500 & runner up of the NVC 11 Women's Entrepreneurship Prize) – created the world’s safest bicycle light for riders and commuters that illuminates the rider, increasing visibility by 10x
• 5th place: Volta Irrigation ($1,000 & winner of the NVC 11 Social Impact Prize) – unique social enterprise that brings highly efficient irrigation technology to small hold farmers in Africa, increasing their profitability and improving their crop yield
• EdBoard  – educational kit that teaches children between the ages of 5-11 the basics of circuit building
• Collision Band  – a sensor product that detects an athlete’s likelihood of suffering a concussion or other head injury while playing football and other sports, so parents, coaches and referees can keep athletes safe and healthy
• Water x Energy  – a social enterprise focused on using water to generate energy that is then used to purify dirty water in rural villages in Latin America

Stride Tech will be one of five teams competing in the NVC 11 Championships on Wednesday, April 3 at the Boulder Theater.

"Whether we win the NVC 11 Championships or not, we know the feedback, the connections made, and the whole experience overall will be invaluable," said Acharya. "Sensor technology and big data are so readily available, so it is a real shame just how underserved and unoccupied the senior health tech space is, especially surrounding falls and walkers. With Stride Tech, we are striving to change that, and NVC has proven to be an incredible launching point for that vision."

Stay tuned in the coming days as we announce the rest of the Track finalists!

Register Now for the NVC 11 Championships!