The Stanford Center on Longevity is pleased to announce eight Finalist teams for the 2021 Longevity Design Challenge. These Finalists were selected from 223 submissions received from 37 different countries.  The Challenge, now in its eighth year, is open to teams from any accredited university in the world.

The goal of the Challenge is to encourage student designers to innovate for our increasingly longer lives. The 2021 challenge to design for “After the Pandemic” was meant to inspire students to think about the issues that they have faced during this huge cultural shift, and to come up with solutions that will help people live longer and healthier lives both now and in the future. Students were encouraged to use the Stanford Center on Longevity’s New Map of Life: After the Pandemic project as a source of inspiration for their designs.

“This challenge clearly resonated with students around the world, and they got very creative both with the issues they chose to address – from schooling at home, to juggling work and family in the same space, to aging at home with family far away – and with their solutions,” commented Marie Conley Smith, who coordinates the Challenge. “I look forward to seeing how these Finalists further develop their designs and help bring about a brighter post-pandemic future.”

Finalists were selected by a panel of 32 expert judges drawn from industry, academia, and non-profit foundations. Teams will be awarded $1,000 to develop their designs further and will compete for a $10,000 first prize in the online finals in April.

This year’s finalists are (in alphabetical order):

Acties (University of Maribor, Slovenia) – An app designed to motivate children to do daily exercise at home using an “advent-calendar”-like reward system.

Foris Labs (Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Nigeria) – An offline platform that simulates a science lab for high school students, in which they can perform individual or group experiments.

Intelligent Health Promotion Service System (National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan) – A service which enables patients to complete physiological rehabilitation from home with remote help from medical professionals.

Jolly Jolie (King’s College London, UK) – Soap-coated stickers which reveal themselves as a child washes their hands to encourage thorough handwashing.

Me Time (NMIMS School of Design, India) – A multi-device home system aimed at helping mothers working from home have more control over their work and family time.

Near (Northwestern University, USA) – A service which helps families find personalized monitoring solutions for older adults aging at home when their loved ones live far away.

PhoneBook (Metropolitan State University of Denver, USA) – A 3D-printed electronic device that transforms a smartphone into a laptop computing experience.

Wulu (Harvard Kennedy School, USA) – A chatbot which provides a safe space for adolescents to seek mental health and gender-related help and resources.

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About the Challenge
The Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge is a global competition aimed at encouraging students to design products and services to improve the lives of people across all ages. Established in 2013, the Challenge is focused on ways to motivate and empower people in their daily lives both inside their homes and in their community.

The challenge is made possible by generous sponsorship from a number of companies and foundations, including, Target, Honda R&D Americas, Procter and Gamble, The Davis Phinney Foundation, and Eskaton.