ICU Cockpit at ETH HealthTech week
The ICU Cockpit was featured as a case at the ETH HealthTech Week 2026, which took place from 31 August to 4 September 2026 on the Hönggerberg Campus of ETH Zurich. The programme is an intensive five-day summer school organised by ETH Zurich together with partners from UZH, HSG and ZHAW, in which interdisciplinary student teams from life sciences and medicine, engineering, and business work on real challenges from hospitals, insurers and industry. They engage in conducting user interviews, validating their ideas, building prototypes, and pitching to a jury of clinicians, investors and industry leaders. We contributed our case through the USZ Health Innovation Hub, one of the case sponsors alongside Barmelweid, Sanitas, Valens and Ypsomed.
The challenge we posed was deliberately open-ended. How can a mature research infrastructure for high-resolution multimodal data collection, computational disease modelling and real-time decision support find its way from a single university hospital into routine care elsewhere? Bridging the gap between research infrastructure and clinical deployment is a hard, and not primarily technical, problem.
Over the week, two teams approached it from different angles. One focused on the translation and commercialisation path, working out how the platform’s value could be articulated to hospital leadership and turning the research infrastructure into a business case; they also reached out to their own networks to collect feedback from clinical decision-makers on feasibility. The other explored the clinical use case in critical care, arriving at the view that the most valuable role for AI at the bedside is to give clinicians the right information at the right time rather than to replace clinical judgement. Both teams presented convincing pitches on Friday.
The week was a compact crash course in the non-technical side of health innovation and a useful outside perspective on our own work. Two points in particular carry over into how we think about the ICU Cockpit going forward. Value has to be made legible to hospital decision-makers, not only to researchers. And the design of decision support should follow from what clinicians actually need in the moment of care. We are grateful to the teams and to the organisers for a genuinely energising week.
A big thanks to the students of both teams for their hard work!