Three students from Hankuk Academy of Foreign Studies took the grand prize in Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI)’s 5th Bio Startup Idea Contest. The awards were handed out at COEX Friday.

The Voice Doc team, comprised of 2nd and 3rd-year students from the local high school, won on the idea of a treatment device for Parkinson's disease patients with a speech disability.

"We got the idea from meeting Alzheimer's patients and Parkinson's disease patients while volunteering. We saw that they had difficulties communicating due to dysarthria and aimed to solve that," said Jo Gyu-hwi, who was the team leader. “We are studying machine learning language by ourselves.”

The Voice Doc team received high scores from all judges by developing a feature generalization method using the generative adversarial network (GAD), a class of artificial intelligence algorithms used in unsupervised machine learning, the KHIDI said.

"We will work towards completing the product prototype by linking up with medical institutions in the future,” Jo added.

The team was chosen out of 130 ideas submitted to the KHIDI. Applicants included a wide range of people from college students to people who were looking to create their startups, the agency said.

A total of 14.9 million won ($14,000) were given to winners.

"We will continue to actively support those interested in startups and help them raise the possibility of establishing one,” said Um Bo-yeong, the division head at KHIDI.