When Team Aloe won the Grand Prize at the University of Utah’s 2025 Bench to Bedside competition, the recognition represented a major milestone — and a prize of $20,000 — but not the finish line.
The annual competition, hosted by the University of Utah’s Center for Medical Innovation, brings together students from medicine, engineering, business and design to tackle real-world clinical challenges. Aloe’s winning project centers on a handheld, AI-powered ultrasound device designed for at-home use, allowing patients to monitor shoulder injuries without clinical visits or medical training.
The device is specifically designed to detect early, asymptomatic rotator cuff tears. These are small injuries that often go unnoticed until they worsen or re-tear. Using an app-guided scan, users can place the ultrasound probe on their own shoulder while AI analyzes the images and delivers interpreted results directly to a smartphone. The system acts as an early-warning tool, helping users decide whether rest and recovery are sufficient or whether medical intervention is needed before the injury progresses.
Since earning the Grand Prize, the team has shifted into a new phase of development, focusing on turning their concept into a functional, reliable medical device.
According to Nathaniel Fargo, an electrical engineering and physics double major and one of Aloe’s lead engineers, much of the team’s recent progress has centered on making the technology a reality instead of just a theory. “Winning Bench to Bedside gave us momentum,” says Fargo. “At the time, we didn’t yet have a device you could actually take home and use. Since then, we’ve been putting a lot of work into building something that meets real medical standards.”
One of the team’s biggest engineering breakthroughs since the competition has been successfully generating ultrasound images directly from their custom-built hardware. Fargo, who focuses on the electrical engineering side of the project, has been designing the internal electronics from the ground up. Inside the ultrasound probe, tiny piezoelectric crystal arrays rapidly vibrate when electrical signals are applied, sending high-frequency sound waves into the body and capturing the echoes that bounce back from different tissues. Fargo’s work involves translating those faint returning signals into clear ultrasound images that can be processed and displayed through a mobile app.
At the same time, Aloe has expanded its technical team. With many original members graduating last year, Fargo recruited new students with backgrounds in computer science and medicine to advance the project’s artificial intelligence systems. These systems are designed to guide users through the scanning process, even if they have no medical training, and screen images for early signs of rotator cuff injury progression
Training the AI has also been a major focus for Fargo. The team has already compiled what Fargo describes as one of the “biggest public ultrasound datasets,” allowing their system to first learn what ultrasound images look like before being trained on specific shoulder injuries. Now, they are refining the models to recognize specific features related to shoulder injuries, such as inflammation, tendon changes and muscle size.
Beyond engineering, the team has begun laying the groundwork for regulatory approval. With support from Bench to Bedside mentors and University of Utah FDA experts, Aloe is researching clearance pathways that would allow the device to reach users without requiring prohibitively expensive clinical trials.
Winning the competition has also opened doors to industry partnerships and funding opportunities. The team is now working directly with manufacturers to source higher-quality ultrasound probes, a shift that Fargo says has helped speed up development.
Looking ahead, Fargo envisions Aloe’s impact extending beyond shoulder rehabilitation. While the current focus remains on rotator cuff injuries, the long-term goal is an at-home ultrasound platform capable of monitoring multiple parts of the body and supporting early intervention across sports medicine, rehabilitation and preventative care.
“The bigger vision is giving people more insight into what’s happening inside their bodies,” Fargo says. “Earlier information leads to better decisions and better outcomes.”
Since the Bench to Bedside competition, Team Aloe’s roster has evolved as some members graduated and new students joined to continue the project’s development. The current team includes Nathaniel Fargo, Spencer Marx, Kwon Saavedra, Evan Hymas, Jon Warner, Jordan Brown, Tony Zhang and Akshay Nagar. The original competition team also included Helaman Brown, Bethany Covington, Isabella White, David Needens and Konrad Willey.