Grad student Katarzyna Matlak MID 17 and a team she collaborated with won a Finalist prize for Vitality, a monitoring systemthat aspires to “create the new normal for pediatric hospital care,” at the recent MIT Hacking Medicine 2016 Grand Hack.
Working with an interdisciplinary group of medical industry professionals, theIndustrial Design major made prototypes of two wireless stickies: a foot sticky (above) that measures blood oxygen levels and a chest version for monitoring heart rate and other vital signs. Eliminating the wires currently needed to monitor chronic conditions in children, says Matlak, will reduce false alarms triggered by jostling and improve mother-child bonding.
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.
Whether you attended SXSW, sent a surrogate colleague, or just followed along via tweets and blogs, you know that 72,000 artists and innovators descended upon Austin, Texas, for another big event. Every year, there seems to be the unstated challenge that the previous year must be topped. As a participant, you hope for it. As a contributor and sponsor, you push yourself to achieve it. That’s what we refer to as the X factor at SXSW.
And in 2016, three healthcare advertising agencies came together to create a wide new range of possibilities for the ever-growing Health and MedTech Track. This experimental program at SXSW would require all of the agency partners, along with MIT Hacking Medicine, to work as one team to rethink healthcare. We’re proud to say that we did just that. Let’s examine six X factors that produced some amazing results…
1. EXPERIMENTING WITH A NEW FORMAT 2. EXAMINING PATIENT NEEDS 3. EXTRACTING BIG THINKING 4. EXPLOITING YOUR BABY 5. EXCHANGING IDEAS 6. EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS
It’s amazing what can happen when innovators come together with the common purpose of rethinking healthcare. We knew going into this process that there would be some interest and participation. We just didn’t know there would be so much. We knew there would be interesting ideas that came from the “hack”; we just didn’t realize the caliber of innovation would be so high. The agency partners were left asking a bigger question: What would it look like if big pharma implemented hackathon thinking as a standard practice for solving their big issues? Imagine breaking down a problem without the barriers normally associated with large bureaucracies. What else can technology do to improve the lives of patients? It’s clear that a disciplined approach creates better-than-expected outcomes. The future of innovation will come through the kind of X factor we experienced at SXSW.
Startupbootcamp Miami and the Idea Center at Miami Dade College are excited to bring MIT Hacking Medicine to Miami for a two-day hackathon* aimed at developing innovative solutions to stem the tide of childhood obesity.
This event represents MIT Hacking Medicine’s first time in Miami. We welcome all innovators, entrepreneurs, technologists, healthcare and educational professionals, food and beverage purveyors and other public and private sector community members to join us on February 20-21 to help us build healthier communities and improve the future health for all our children. Apply here by Feb. 15 to participate!
