Friday, October 28
12–12:30 p.m. Presentation by Shreya Rangarajan
12:30–12:45 p.m. Questions & Dialogue
Join us in person at the Medical Sciences Building, Room 274
Or attend virtually via Zoom call-in here!
Voice disorders are abnormalities in vocal pitch, tone, volume, resonance, and pace. In the United States, roughly 29.7 million individuals are affected each year, but only three million seek treatment. Shreya Rangarajan will present a new platform called VOCA Health (trademark pending), developed by students at at Carle Illinois College of Medicine. The innovation is aimed at finding new ways to prevent vocal complications, detect vocal disorders earlier, and encourage more patients to seek treatment in a timely manner. Rangarajan will describe how the student-run pre-incubator AxisMED helped her team determine the feasibility of this idea through user interviews and iterate the design of the platform with feedback from interviews. Team VOCA won two awards in the campus-wide COZAD New Venture Challenge competition last spring.
Shreya Rangarajan is a second-year medical student at Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Prior to medical school, she earned her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts, and her master’s degree in performing arts medicine at University College London in the United Kingdom. She is passionate about performing arts health and intends to continue her interests in this space through innovation and medicine.
