Cillian Gartlan 

Fifth Year Student

 describes his success at 

Scifest 2015

“Last year when I was in Transition Year I entered the Young Scientists competition with a project entitled ‘Risk mitigation in the provision of blood-thinning drugs as an early intervention for stroke victims’. I was awarded a Highly Commended award for my work and was encouraged by the judges to further develop some of my specific recommended solutions.

Later that year, I came up with an idea for a device to store patient information for stroke victims, called the ‘Ictus’ (Latin for ‘stroke’). This device will allow doctors to understand the full history of a stroke victim, including previous scans, in a secure way that will only be accessible to doctors.  It should enable the mitigation of many of the risks that I found in stroke care in my earlier project and will also make diagnoses, and therefore treatments, quicker and more effective.

I developed this idea through contact with doctors and stroke specialists in three major hospitals and I entered my new project ‘Harnessing patient information to mitigate the risks associated with stroke treatment’ into Scifest Dundalk in March 2015, where I was awarded the Boston Scientific Medical Devices Award.  I was later informed, after the summer holidays, that my project had been selected by Boston Scientific as one of the top 6 medical devices projects in Ireland, and that I would be entered into the Scifest final, to compete for the national Boston Scientific Medical devices award.

I displayed my project at the final in November 2015 and some of my judges included researchers and scientists from Boston Scientific, including their Head of Research and Development in Ireland.  They really quizzed me on the science behind the idea and were interested in my visits to hospitals and interaction with patients.  I was delighted to hear my name called out at the awards ceremony and to win the overall National Medical Devices Award.  The judges were very enthusiastic about the possibilities of my idea for patient outcomes and I was invited by Boston Scientific to present my project to their engineers in Galway in the New Year when they have also kindly offered to give me a tour of their facilities.  I was also invited to be part of the Boston Scientific exhibit at the Galway Science and Technology Festival on Sunday November 22^nd, where I presented my project to visitors of the exhibition.  I plan to continue to work on this project and hope to trial the device at Beaumont hospital some time in 2016.”

Congratulations is simply an understatement.  This major achievement can only be highly commended not only for the admirable awards adorned but the sheer effort, work and ingenuity that Cillian himself contributed in making it all possible. We wish Cillian the very best in his endeavours in the future.