CHICAGO, Aug. 5, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A startup company with a lighting and monitoring product designed to help the older adult population won top honors Tuesday during the Dragons' Den competition at CompTIA ChannelCon 2015. ChannelCon is the premier education, training and partnering event for the information technology (IT) channel, produced annually by CompTIA, the IT industry trade association.

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Luna Lights won a $5,000 cash prize over three other Chicago-based tech startup firms, each of which made a five-minute funding pitch to a panel of three venture capitalists and an audience of more than 1,000 members of the IT channel community. The event was a spinoff of Dragons' Den, the popular global TV show where entrepreneurs make their pitches for investments.

Luna Lights is a portable, automated lighting system that affixes to a bed. When a resident gets out of bed, it activates lighting in the room. The systems also sends an alert to a caregiver if the individual is out of bed for an extended period of time.

"Falls are the number one cause of injuries among older adults," company founder and CEO Donovan Morrison said. "In assisted living facilities half of residents fall at least once every year; and 25 percent of falls occur at night when visibility is reduced and staffing levels are lower."

The product was first conceptualized by Morrison and Matt Wilcox, the company's chief technology officer, three years ago when they were students at Northwestern University. In August 2014 Luna Lights was selected to join the Healthbox accelerator program, a global community dedicated to driving change in healthcare and providing resources to help healthcare startups achieve meaningful growth.

Wilcox said the $5,000 prize will help with manufacturing of the product. The company completed a pilot project with a Chicago area healthcare facility in March and has a second pilot upcoming in mid-September. Five other senior living communities are scheduled to become paying customers this year.

Also participating in the ChannelCon Dragons' Den event were:

Guard Llama, an on-demand personal emergency response application that, with the push of a button, transmits location and personal profile information to an emergency dispatcher.
Audiovert, creator of Hexon, the world's first customized modular speaker system that combines sonic and visual arts.
NexLP, developer of a web-deployed software application that utilizes an exclusive text analytics engine to index corporate data and understand the social, emotional and behavioral information locked within data.

Highlights from CompTIA ChannelCon 2015 are available on Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #ChannelCon15. The conference continues through Aug. 5.

To learn more, visit CompTIA online, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

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SOURCE CompTIA

For further information: Steven Ostrowski, CompTIA, sostrowski@comptia.org, 630-678-8468