Tilting Toward Success

The health sector needs to revolutionise and technology can help that happen, says Benjamin Dunn, one of a group of Victoria University alumni who has developed an interactive gaming system to make rehabilitation exercise fun.

Swibo Tilt being used at Victoria Open Day
Swibo Tilt being used at Victoria Open Day 2017 by prospective students.

He was on hand at Victoria’s open day on 1 September to show off the balance training system known as “Swibo Tilt” which his company Swibo has developed. The team of engineering and design alumni who make up Swibo came up with the concept while at Victoria’s annual entrepreneur bootcamp and a couple of years down the track, they are now exploring distribution possibilities in China.

Ben is also currently young entrepreneur in residence at Viclink, Victoria’s commercialisation office that helps researchers transform their ideas into products or services. He says Swibo Tilt is a great example of a practical application of technology being used to deliver a better user experience and more effective therapy.

“Swibo Tilt not only encourages exercise by making it fun, interesting, and a cool thing to do, but we also provide measurement so the users’ physiotherapist or trainer can tell how much they’re doing their exercises and can adapt their programme to their needs.”

Benjamin studied engineering at Victoria and went on to do biomedical engineering in the States. He’s excited to see the new Bachelor of Health degree at Victoria, particularly the health software and health informatics components.

“It’s good for people to understand that there’s more to working in health than being a doctor or a nurse – there’s room for tech people as well. We can have a huge impact on the heath sector by designing these technologies specifically for a set of patients or by making the health practitioners’ lives easier as well,” he says.

“Doing the Bachelor of Health you would get exposure to both the technology side of it and the health side of it, so you can get a good understanding of not only what’s possible technically, but what’s needed from a health and therapy perspective. The health industry needs to revolutionise and change to adopt these kinds of new technologies because they can have such an impact.”