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2016 PinCH Award


Congratulations to the Emotion Prosthetics Team on their winning entry in the 2016 Pitt Innovation Challenge.

The Emoto Team was awarded $25,000 to support the further refinement and implementation of the Emoto, a wearable sensor and stimulator with a mobile application that helps people take control of their stress with enhanced recognition of one?s own and others? emotions. The device, known as Purrr, has sensing technology that allows users to measure their physical signs of stress in real-time and visualize them via a simple dashboard on the app. It is also equipped with a vibroacoustic generator that allows users to directly modulate their stress level. Click here to watch a video on the Emoto project.

The multidisciplinary team included psychiatry residents David Rabin, MD, PhD, Shan Gao, MD, PhD and Eric Loraas, MD, undergraduate student Noah Freedman, and business advisors Lorenzo Soletti, MD and Kathryn Fantauzzi, MPA, and Department of Psychiatry scientific advisor, Greg Siegle, PhD.

The Pitt Innovation Challenge (PInCh) competition is designed to generate innovative solutions to challenging health problems. The University of Pittsburgh Office of the Provost, Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), and Innovation Institute collaborated to create the PInCh competition in order to stimulate innovation in a fresh exciting way.  An important goal of the PInCh competition is to bring together a diverse team of problem solvers who may not otherwise have considered working together.