Billy Gunn

On the first day of the technology-driven Innov8 Lafayette festival, Lafayette Utilities System Director Terry Huval remembered the forces he and others had to fight to install a fiber-optic network that brought super-fast Internet to all city residents.

“We were crazy enough to do it,” Huval said of the 1 gigabyte per second fiber network completed in 2010.

Huval, who also heads the company that brings customers the broadband, LUS Fiber, recalled how the audacious fiber-to-the-home idea encountered all manner of opposition from entrenched interests: telecommunications, cable TV providers and others. He said it was not lost on him how hard it was to reach the point LUS Fiber and the city found itself hosting the third annual Innov8 Lafayette, a festival that advocates wide-ranging entrepreneurial goals and has a particular focus on technology.

Huval kicked off Innov8’s first day at the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise Center by introducing health care professionals whose jobs have been made more efficient by technology.

Bradley Cruice, a medical professional who works for the Lafayette Parish school system, and Geoff Daily, of the Lafayette General Foundation, described how schoolchildren in Lafayette Parish are healthier and learning more through telemedicine, which allows doctors miles away to interpret students’ vital signs or symptoms and make a diagnosis. Cruice said it allows the student to stay in school, and also allows the student’s parents to stay at work rather than take time off to care for their kid.

On the other end of the age spectrum, technology is helping care for the elderly, whose numbers are growing while the number of beds and facilities for the elderly are stagnant or declining, said Keith Speights, of the medical company RosieConnect. Speights’ company developed a robot that gathers a patient’s medical information quickly for the medical chart, and also to alert a physician if there is something wrong.