A student team that presented a business plan to commercialize two devices for monitoring pain in premature infants took first place in this year's Forbes Entrepreneurial Competition and third place in the Mark Ain Business Model Competition at the University of Rochester.

Biomedical engineering students Benjamin Freedman and Johanna Kelly, which make up the OmNeo, LLC team, presented two systems:

• wee rePLI, which objectively measures pain during procedures
• ORB|IT, which continually measures an infant's pain

Reducing pain in premature infants can assist clinicians in better focusing treatment and can help prevent developmental health consequences. The devices were developed by a larger team of students, supervised by Professors Laurel Carney from Biomedical Engineering, and Martin Schiavento from the School of Nursing.