DUBAI // Dalal al Dhabyani and her friends had the brilliant idea but not the business knowledge to take it to the next stage. In March, the students from Dubai Women's College won first prize and Dh73,000 at the EPIC young entrepreneurs competition for their invention of a four-in-one diabetes kit. The D-Kit is the size of a mobile phone and combines a glucose test, a blood pressure and pulse monitor and a body-mass index test. It comes with a guide available in book and DVD format. The D-Kit is aimed not only at the 25 per cent of the Emirati population who have diabetes, but an additional 50 per cent who are believed to be at risk of contracting the disease.
Miss al Dhabyani, Salimah al Harbi and Khawla Mohammed, all Emiratis, beat competition from 44 other teams. They also won US$5,000 (Dh18,000) for the best undergraduate project. "We couldn't have done any of this without the centre," said Ms Dhabyani, 22, who has just graduated. "We're health science students so we had no idea about business. We knew about the product and were committed to it but didn't know how to put it into practice. The centre helped to connect us with people in all sorts of disciplines from health to finance. Their expertise provided us with a lot of support."
The women hope to patent the kit and have it endorsed by the Ministry of Health. * Melanie Swan
