Twiage's tool helps EMTs forward data

Running the Twiage app on a smartphone, an EMT can dictate notes and send them to the hospital as text, and also share photographs of a patient's injuries, identification, and EKG readings. It's like Twitter for triage. Get it? Twiage.The company was born out of a recent hackathon at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Fittingly, Twiage is the brainchild of an MIT grad named Crystal Law, who also happens to be an EMT.In addition to the smartphone app, there's a version of Twiage for Google Glass, which means John Rodley is involved.Rodley has been working for months on an app called ArrtGlass that uses the wearable computer's first-person camera to let a doctor who cannot be in a hospital room see a patient through the eyes of someone at the bedside.

At the hackathon, Twiage won the Ariadne Labs Prize, which comes with a chance to pitch for a $100,000 grant in the coming months. Ariadne Labs, a center for health systems innovation, opened last year as a joint venture of Brigham and Women's and the Harvard School of Public Health.When Disney's animators were feeling constrained by their digital tools, Sarah Frisken got the call. A former boss of hers was running Disney's research-and-development division, and he told Frisken that the animators felt they could not do their best work using existing software. "It was taking them twice as long to use the digital tools, and they wanted them to be more responsive," Frisken said.She spent four years developing what became the Sketch Drawing Engine for Disney.

The guiding philosophy, Frisken said, "was that it is so easy to pick up a piece of paper and sketch out an idea. We wanted to do that same thing with software, where you could just open it and start to draw."This past summer, Frisken, a former Tufts computer graphics professor, released a new version of the software, called Mischief. She is targeting professional artists and designers who tend to use a tablet and stylus for input — though you can use a mouse, too. The software sells for $65, and it is available for Macs and PCs. The company, 61 Solutions, still consists of just Frisken and a handful of contractors. She has boot-strapped the Cambridge start-up so far, but may try to raise outside funding.October is National Pizza Month, which at some of the start-ups I visit is sort of like saying October is National Oxygen Month.