The 2025 cohort of the Digital Health Track of the Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator included projects ranging from detecting fractured bones without x-rays to harnessing AI for reconstructive surgery.
Dr. Karen Huyck was conducting grant-funded research on helping people with work-limiting physical and mental health conditions return to the workforce when she and her team realized there was a potential commercial spinoff from their research.
“There are lots of traditionally siloed services that needed to be brought together and coordinated,” said Huyck, who is an occupational and environmental medicine physician at Dartmouth Hitchcock, and associate professor with Geisel School of Medicine and The Dartmouth Institute.
On the recommendation of a mentor at the Magnuson Center, Huyck and her team joined the 2025 Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator for Healthcare and Medicine – Digital Health Track, where they developed a business model for LINK~VT, a novel web portal designed to streamline and optimize return-to-work coordination, ultimately reducing the negative economic and health impact work disability has on individuals, families, and communities.
“We had identified this need, and the accelerator gave us the support to figure out the components of transferring our technology and forming a company,” Huyck said.
The Dartmouth Innovation Accelerator for Healthcare and Medicine, a partnership between the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship and the Geisel School of Medicine, has recently expanded to include separate tracks in Therapeutics, Medical Devices and Diagnostics, Healthcare Delivery, and Digital Health. The latter track, which the Magnuson Center runs with the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, aims to provide innovators like Huyck with the knowledge and resources they need to bring digital health innovations to market. The Accelerator includes guidance from alumni and industry leaders, as well as access to funding to advance projects. Now in its third year, the Digital Health Accelerator had eight teams of students, faculty, and staff participating in its most recent cohort.
Huyck’s team and with two others—Kino Vision and MIRA—were awarded $20,000 each in funding to advance their projects. In addition, the winning projects received up to $5,000 in in-kind legal services from Lowenstein Sandler law firm, facilitated by Meredith Beuchaw ’03, who is a partner at the firm.
“We don’t want the funding they were awarded to immediately need to be spent on legal fees,” Beuchaw explained. “So, coupled with the funding, we’re giving the teams a credit at our law firm so they can start doing other things with the $20,000 award to advance their projects.”
A fourth project, BoneScope, received in-kind engineering support from Simbex, a product development firm based in Lebanon.
For Huyck, the funding comes at a critical time. A corporation has asked to partner with Work Health CoLab, parent company of LINK~VT, to run a national pilot beginning in January.
“The funding is allowing us to meet this rapid timeline that our partner would like,” Huyck said. “That will better position us to succeed in that pilot, and ultimately scale our services nationally.”
Measuring body composition from a phone photo
Kino Vision—which also won a $20,000 award—is a mobile app that can measure body composition anywhere. Using photos from a smartphone, the app can detect body fat, lean mass, bone density, and water with similar accuracy to the leading technology in the body scan space but at lower cost and with greater accessibility for patients and providers, said Jackson Gerard ’25, co-founder of the app.
Gerard and his business partner Toby Reynolds, Ohio State ’25, have been working on Kino Vision since high school. Today, the app is live with some early traction, and the duo are focused on three medical studies through Ohio State and Dartmouth that are exploring Kino Vision as a diagnostic tool.
The funding from the Digital Health Accelerator will be used to support those studies, Gerard said.
“We’re looking at using the funds to purchase additional datasets and recruit more participants to our existing studies, helping amass the quantity of data necessary to bring this technology to life,” he explained.
In addition, “the in-kind legal award will be extremely helpful to us as we get off the ground and start amassing real users,” Gerard said. “Privacy becomes an interesting issue when you are collecting photographs of users, so making sure that our terms, privacy policies, and business set-up are rock solid is extremely important.”
Like all teams, Kino Vision received written feedback from the External Advisory Panel that evaluated pitches. Oftentimes, pitching can feel like a black hole since it’s rare to receive feedback, Gerard said. Having feedback from industry leaders “could have been the best part of the whole experience,” he said, noting that as an early stage startup founder he wouldn’t typically have access to such high caliber talent.
Reynolds was “blown away” by the accelerator—both in terms of the programming and his peers in the cohort.
“This group is a great example of who you would want to spend time among,” he said.
Harnessing AI to improve breast reconstruction
The third winning pitch, MIRA, emerged from the work of Dr. Ankoor Talwar, a plastic surgery resident at Dartmouth Hitchcock.
“MIRA’s mission is to harness AI to improve the process of breast reconstruction for all women with breast cancer,” Talwar explained. The award will be used to advance the technology, while the legal services will be used to incorporate a company.
The other teams, as well as the External Advisory Panel, brought a breadth of knowledge “spanning all segments of healthcare innovation,” Talwar said.
“The education connections gained from this accelerator will help us build our business model, go to market strategy, and integrate with key players,” he added.
Detecting broken bones without x-rays
A fourth team, BoneScope, didn’t receive grant funding, but still caught the eye of members of the external review panel. The team, led by Dr. Tim Burdick ’89, MED ’02, Associate Professor of Community and Family Medicine at Geisel School of Medicine, developed a medical device that allows first responders to detect fractured bones without x-rays, using a digital tuning fork.
That intrigued Greg Lange, CEO of Simbex, a Lebanon-based product development company.
“I really like seeing simple ideas that can save time, simplify patients’ and clinicians’ lives, and be used out in the field.,” Lange said.
Because of that, Simbex awarded BoneScope up to $5,000 in engineering assistance.
“We will use it to develop prototypes of the straps that hold the BoneScope in place, the smartphone software to measure the sound, and the machine learning model to predict if the bone is broken or not,” Burdick explained.
He added, “The Accelerator was amazing.”
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This article also appears on the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurships’s website.