In 2023 PhD Candidate Luke Hipwood (left) mentored a team of high school students from Mansfield State High School as part of the BIOTech Futures Challenge – a challenge that involves academics mentoring high school students on a project that aims to innovate a new idea or problem-solve a current issue in STEM.
– “The students are very enthusiastic and curious about science and wanted to see what goes on in a real-life lab, therefore, I decided to bring them on today’s lab tour”, says Hipwood. Alba Cisneros Martin (right), PhD Candidate, also helped out presenting the 3D lab to our visitors.
-“Being involved in cancer research personally, I taught the team I was paired with about what cancer is, and how researchers currently come up with new ideas for cancer diagnosis, prevention, and treatment”, says Luke.
From this prompt, they found a market gap and came up with the idea to create an AI-driven sun safety app, “Sun Shield”, with the ultimate aim being to prevent sun-related skin cancer. The students saw that current sun safety apps are very basic, and don’t utilise the power of AI to their fullest extent. The app has multiple sun safety features, including a built-in sun safety AI chatbot assistant; live UV index for any region in Australia; a photographic skin-tracking feature, that uses AI-driven algorithms to predict the skin cancer potential of a mole; and a calendar feature that lets you store and look back on recorded UV exposure and images taken using the app. These features not only let users stay on top of their sun safety and UV exposure, but also make it easier for users to show dermatologists or GPs their moles, and any potentially worrisome changes those moles have had over time.
The team was very successful in this challenge, placing 2nd overall out of 38 teams in the QLD competition, and 1st in the prototype category of 103 teams in the National competition held in Sydney.