Thank you Grand Hack team for offering the services of 100+ professionals and experts in the healthcare industry. I mean, they got doctors to take a whole weekend to help a bunch of college kids with ‘pie in the sky’ ideas. Having time with just 6 of those 100+ mentors was an invaluable opportunity that I hope I took full advantage of. Time with these mentors not only evolved our project for the competition but, it also helped out the mentors. The mentors and participants networked, saw how each other worked in teams (aka future job opportunities here and future program participants, etc.), and overall everyone walked away learning or gaining something new.
This competition exposed me to the innovative side of the healthcare industry as a mechanical engineer and opened me up to a community that could aide in bringing my ideas further. Spending the weekend at MIT for Grand Hacks was definitely a spark in my early engineering career and I know it will help me later down the road.
A team that included multiple students from Brown University’s Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) has just won the Best Aging in Place Hack award at MIT’s Grand Hack 2016. Inspired by a mentor whose mother suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, Sven Eberhardt (Brown University postdoc), Youssef Barhomi (Brown University research engineer), Pankaj Gupta (Brown University research assistant), Nediyana Daskalova (Brown CS PhD candidate), Adrienne Tran (Brown University alum and founder of Neurocurious), and Alejandro Scaffa (Brown University PhD candidate) formed team “alzEYEmers” to create a unique solution based on computer vision, AI, and neuroscience.
Their project leverages software that can recognize common household objects as well as hazards, then supplies an Alzheimer’s patient with a camera worn around the neck. During any unattended hours, the camera serves as a watchdog: if it spies a hazard (for example, a fire), it can redirect the patient with recorded prompts, alert a family member, or even call 911.
“This was a very different hackathon from others I’ve been to,” says Nediyana, “The idea was to talk to many people from diverse backgrounds in order to think about the problem from various points of view before solving it. We spoke to six different people about their experiences with Alzheimer’s before we even began hacking. We really found it interesting to spend so much time thinking about a problem before jumping to a technological solution.”
Across all tracks, the range of issues being tackled by the hackathon teams was as staggeringly diverse as anyone with passing familiarity with the U.S. health care (non) system might imagine, ranging from medication adherence, to anonymous STD diagnosis sharing, to early diagnostics for Parkinson’s, to building better communities and coaching for diabetics, to a tool seeking to protect against opioid abuse relapse by monitoring communications with “friends” taggged as “safe” or as on a “watchlist,” to online bill payment, to physical therapy compliance and coaching, to a SaaS tool for traumatic brain injury treatment for veterans.
The ideas presented (developed within the confines of the hackathon) of course were early-stage, and some showed more promise than others. Some seemed to demonstrate a lack of awareness of other tools already out there doing the same or similar things — but I will chalk that up mostly to youthful enthusiasm; frankly, while a handful of ideas hashed out at a hackathon like this may proceed to development as features, products or even companies, the key output of an event like this is energized hackers eager to solve big problems in healthcare. As the organizers said more than once in the lead-up to the announcement of the winners of various categories of prizes, the judges are often wrong, meaning that it is often the teams that do not win recognition at hackathons that go on to develop products and form companies that are successful in the digital health space.
