Industrial design students Celine Hong and Cindy Nachareun’s team BeLeaf was one of two winners at this year’s Hatching Health medical innovation event the “Great Hatch,” held at UBC’s Engineering Design Centre March 3-5, 2017.

The PHIX Grand Prize for excellence went to BeLeaf and UriKnow. BeLeaf tackles depression through a unique, personalized way of connecting with loved ones.

The BeLeaf team set out to address the following challenges: how might those living with depression connect with loved ones for support when they decide to reach out for help? And how might we create and nourish effective ways of communicating and managing depression?

Their solution called BeLeaf takes depression and embodies it physically through a light-based object to encourage the user and their supporter to view the depression as something that needs to be cared for together. They also conceptualized an accompanying app that includes personalized internal coping strategies for the user.

This year’s event included 100 participants, 30 mentors, and 8 judges including Emily Carr’s Health Design Lab Director Caylee Raber. Participants were software engineers, nurses, medical residents, mechanical engineers, designers, data scientists, and numerous other professions as well as students. From over 30 problems pitched, 15 interdisciplinary teams formed and tackled some well-defined and organic problems. They ranged from depression to enabling the visually impaired to improving how people can use a zipper when they have severe difficulty doing so and more.