Good Design Australia

An Australian designed, world first portable medical device, capable of revolutionising the assessment of brain health, has won the country's most prestigious and coveted design prize - the Good Design Award of the Year. Headsafe's Nurochek system provides on-demand data to trained medical practitioners allowing them to make objective assessment of potential injuries, such as concussion, within two minutes.

The wearable device, which fits numerous head sizes, uses sophisticated technology normally only accessible in hospitals, to transmit independent and objective data to a smartphone. It can instantly measure the brain responses of athletes, providing doctors with immediate analysis, potentially avoiding the need for time-consuming clinic tests.

Created by award winning industrial design business 4Design in Surry Hills, the Nurocheck system reduces the guess work and ambiguous testing around brain health. It allows for data to be compared over time to provide historical snapshots of each user, whether they be teenagers or professional athletes.

Now in its 62nd year, the prestigious annual Good Design Awards program, is the nation's highest design honour and has been recognising and rewarding excellence in cutting edge design and breakthrough innovation since 1958. The Awards recognise design excellence across broad sectors and industries and cover everything from the design of products we use each and every day, the services we interact with, the places and spaces we occupy, to the design of the processes and systems that underpin business, industries and economies right through to projects in the social innovation space.

The program celebrates the best in design and architecture across 11 main design disciplines spanning 28 categories. More than 50 design experts from Australia and around the world assessed thousands of applications this year in one of only a handful of international design award programs that conducts a face-to-face, hands-on evaluation of the projects submitted for consideration.

CEO of Good Design Australia, Dr Brandon Gien, said the panel of domestic and international judges, were incredibly impressed with the potential impact Headsafe could have across a variety of sectors to improve health outcomes for people all over the world.

"This product is the Holy Grail for design excellence in every sense. It literally could have a transformative and long lasting impact across the globe. Like all ingeniously well designed products, It transcends superlatives and serves as a shining example of Australian ingenuity and brilliance.  Importantly, it exceeds expectations with respect to our three overarching criteria for assessment: Good Design, Design Innovation and Design Impact. The Nurocheck system was simply a stand out winner this year and joins a fraternity of other top award winners like Tesla and Flow Hive."