Winners announced for 2024 OSU App Competition

Winners announced for 2024 OSU App Competition

Monday, December 2, 2024

Media Contact: Cody Cramer | The Innovation Foundation at OSU | 405-613-2838 | [email protected]

The OSU App Center recently named the winners of the 2024 competition.

Each submission aimed to provide innovation and increase productivity in the industry's day-to-day work. App competition ideas came from multiple disciplines and a variety of undergraduate, graduate students, faculty and staff. Each winner, runner-up and second runner-up received a cash prize to acknowledge their innovative achievement.

"I am greatly impressed by the range of bleeding-edge app ideas we received this year that attempted to address problem in the strategic areas of interest to the Innovation Foundation and Oklahoma State University," said Dr. Jai Rajendran, director of digital innovation commercialization and director of the OSU App Center.

The winner of the 2024 competition was Agri Telehealth which was submitted by Elaine Dorn and Lydia Martins, both master's in international agriculture graduate students. They began working on the app idea as part of a class project last semester.

Lydia Martins, co-creator of Agri Telehealth, was in veterinary school for a year with a focus on large animals. During that time, she realized the large population of people that do not have accessible veterinary care, both in the United States and abroad.

"Since we're both international agriculture students, abroad is really kind of top of mind for us. There is a small shareholder of farmers that are wildly undeserved and that causes a lot of bug issues in terms of malnutrition and insufficient access," Dorn said. "Using an app was a really good way to get information accessible to a large group of people and really ensure that people have access to the animal health care they need."

The app competition spurs innovative ideas for others as well, regardless of podium status. As One Health second runner-up, the psychology department lab is using innovative strides to continue its PACEs research. Protective and Compensatory Experiences (PACEs) are positive experiences in an individual's life used to increase resilience and safeguard against potential mental and physical illnesses.

"This competition is really important for our lab because we've been talking about creating an app for years, and we've never had the time or energy to really think about it. So, this really pushed our team and my students and our staff to really think more about the app and what it might look like," said Dr. Amanda Morris, Regents Professor, George Kaiser Chair and Director of OSU-Tulsa Psychology.

"Our presentation was about our research on cases and our research that we've been doing on PACEs, but the broader research on PACEs, and by having to do this competition and getting us to meet for that, I think it really will push us forward to create an app. So, we're excited, even though we didn't win."

The winners and runners were collectively awarded $11,000.

"Several of the app product ideas presented have the potential to be successful and venture-worthy," said Rajendran. "The Innovation Foundation and the App Center plan to take the winning teams through venture development programs at OSU to aid the further development of the app ideas."

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.