In this Season 2 premiere of Intrigued to Innovate, host Dr Jovan Tan sits down with Sarah Tan and Tay Hock Jun — two first-year Biomedical Engineering students in the NUS Innovation & Design Programme (NUS iDP), and his own residents at Residential College 4 (RC4).

At IDEATE 2025, NUS’s flagship innovation makerthon, they and three teammates took on a condition they knew almost nothing about—lymphedema. A condition that around 250 million people worldwide suffer from, many of them breast cancer survivors. Current medicine only offers them a machine that pins them to a chair for one to two hours a day, or a sleeve so hot and so tight that patients stop wearing it.

The team’s answer? Replace air with mechanics.

Competing as Team bmETER, they built a motor-driven band that tightens like a zip tie within a lightweight fabric s ...