Pitt School of Medicine Student Innovator is Empowering People to Take Charge of Their Healthcare; University of Pittsburgh Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship, October 21, 2025

KAREN WOOLSTRUM , University of Pittsburgh Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship; Pitt School of Medicine Student Innovator is Empowering People to Take Charge of Their Healthcare

"Inspiration Strikes in the ER

While her research focuses on cystic fibrosis, Li’s entrepreneurial journey began during a rotation in the emergency room. It dawned on her that many patients in the ER could be empowered to take control of their own health monitoring and potentially avoid traumatic and costly ER visits. She quickly devised an idea for an electronic stethoscope that people can use to measure vital signs of the heart and lungs from home.

In collaboration with a friend, Akshaya Anand, a machine-learning graduate student from the University of Maryland, she founded Korion Health and entered the 2022 Randall Family Big Idea Competition hosted by the Big Idea Center, Pitt’s hub for student innovation (part of the OIE).

They were awarded a modest $2,000 4th-place prize, but the value they received from the month-long competition and mentorship extended far beyond that. The experience of crafting her pitch and having her idea validated in the eyes of experienced entrepreneurs gave her the confidence to continue pursuing the device’s commercial potential.

Next up was a pitch competition hosted by the Product Development Managers Association (PDMA) in which she won free first place in the graduate-student category, with the award including consulting hours from local companies such as Bally Design and Lexicon Design that she said “helped me take my half-baked idea and turn it into a prototype to show to investors.”

“This was a high yield for the effort. If it’s something they can hold in their hands it really helps communicate the value proposition,” she added.

From there, things began to snowball. On the same day that she won the UpPrize Social Innovation Competition sponsored by Bank of New York in the racial equity category ($75k), she won the first place prize from the American Heart Association’s EmPOWERED to Serve Business Accelerator ($50k). The resulting publicity attracted the attention of organizers of the Hult Prize Competition, a global student startup competition that receives thousands of applicants each year, who invited her to apply.

“I didn’t know anything about the Hult Prize competition. At first, I thought it was spam,” she admitted.

She had no illusions of advancing to the finals near London, let alone winning the top prize of $1 million: until she did."

Frances Gabe, Creator of the Only Self-Cleaning Home, Dies at 101; New York Times, July 18, 2017

Margalit Fox, New York Times; Frances Gabe, Creator of the Only Self-Cleaning Home, Dies at 101

"More than half a century ago, incensed by the housecleaning that was a woman’s chronic lot, Ms. Gabe began to dream of a house that would see to its own hygiene: tenderly washing, rinsing and drying itself at the touch of a button.

“Housework is a thankless, unending job,” she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996. “It’s a nerve-twangling bore. Who wants it? Nobody!”

And so, with her own money and her own hands, she built just such a house, receiving United States patent 4,428,085 in 1984.

In a 1982 column about Ms. Gabe’s work, the humorist Erma Bombeck proposed her as “a new face for Mount Rushmore.”"

Ray Kurzweil: Accelerating Tech Is Making Old Intellectual Property Laws Obsolete; Singularity Hub, 9/8/16

[Video] Singularity Hub; Ray Kurzweil: Accelerating Tech Is Making Old Intellectual Property Laws Obsolete:

"As technology and innovation move faster and faster, concerns over ownership and access continue to increase. In answer to a question at a Singularity University event, Ray Kurzweil suggested we need to rethink intellectual property laws to more realistically match today’s pace.

Intellectual property laws from the 19th century were envisioned with roughly 20-year cycles, he said, which was enough to give you a head-start on a new idea or invention and attract funding to see it through. But how relevant is a 20-year cycle today when a generation of technology can come and go in a year—and even that is set to speed up?

Attracting investment and capital is a critical function of intellectual property law. But the way things are currently structured, intellectual property laws are falling behind the pace of invention."

The Downfall Of Invention: A Broken Patent System; Huffington Post, 8/16/16

Tahir Amin, Huffington Post; The Downfall Of Invention: A Broken Patent System:

"The cost of dozens of brand-name drugs have nearly doubled in just the past five years. Public outrage over drug prices extends from Capitol Hill to the presidential candidates to patients. In response, pharmaceutical executives are spending more on lobbying and marketing. Yet for all this attention, most of the proposed solutions for reducing prescription drug costs—tougher negotiations, appeals for transparent R&D costs or investigations into insurers—miss one of the primary sources of the problem: the way we award patents.

Today, too many drug makers receive patents for unmerited and unjust reasons...

Not surprisingly, the pharma industry employs a variety of stall tactics that make it virtually impossible for affordable, generic drugs to enter the U.S. market. In what’s called “pay-for-delay,” for example, patent owners pay off generic manufacturers to wait before entering the market, a practice that could violate antitrust laws...

It’s time to restore the U.S. patent system to its original purpose – to protect and incentivize invention, not innovation."

Google patents 'sticky' layer to protect pedestrians in self-driving car accidents; Guardian, 5/18/16

Nicky Woolf, Guardian; Google patents 'sticky' layer to protect pedestrians in self-driving car accidents:

"Google has patented a new “sticky” technology to protect pedestrians if – or when – they get struck by the company’s self-driving cars.

The patent, which was granted on 17 May, is for a sticky adhesive layer on the front end of a vehicle, which would aim to reduce the damage caused when a pedestrian hit by a car is flung into other vehicles or scenery...

It is not known whether Google has active plans to install the new technology on their self-driving cars in the future. The company did not respond immediately to a request from the Guardian for comment, but a spokesperson told the San Jose Mercury News, who first reported the story, that “we hold patents on a variety of ideas. Some of those ideas later mature into real products and services, some don’t.”"

Bluebeard as a Geek: Plundering in High-Tech: On ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ It’s Imitation vs. Invention; New York Times, 5/30/14

Alessandra Stanley, New York Times; Bluebeard as a Geek: Plundering in High-Tech: On ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ It’s Imitation vs. Invention:

"There are absolutists who still believe that everything on the Internet should be free and see themselves as partisans, not parasites. Their motto might as well be “intellectual property is theft.”

Some of those true believers may enjoy a new AMC drama, “Halt and Catch Fire,” which begins on Sunday and is set in Texas in the early 1980s, when PCs were still in their infancy, and IBM dominated the industry.

But it’s an odd show for most viewers to accept at face value. And not just because it’s hard to construct thrilling action sequences out of microchips, floppy disks and coffee breaks. In today’s era of high-tech billionaires and the cult of the start-up, this series goes back in time to glorify imitation, not innovation...

Even the title is so abstruse that an explanation is spelled out in block print at the beginning:

“HALT AND CATCH FIRE (HCF): An early computer command that sent the machine into a race condition, forcing all instructions to compete for superiority at once. Control of the computer could not be regained.”...

Buccaneering on the high seas, the kind that involves daggers, planks and rum, is romantic partly because it remains safely in the past. Copyright piracy, on the other hand, may be too close for comfort."