#grand hack

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. 

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. 

Grad student Katarzyna Matlak MID 17 and a team she collaborated with won a Finalist prize for Vitality, a monitoring system that aspires to “create the new normal for pediatric hospital care,” at the recent MIT Hacking Medicine 2016 Grand Hack.

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.

The Hacking Medicine initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, for instance, has so far hosted almost 50 such events, teaming up engineers and data scientists with clinicians in 1- or 2-day events that are meant to quickly and iteratively work towards initial solutions to a host of health-care problems.

Last week the MIT Grand Hack exponentially accelerated healthcare innovation by bringing together engineers, clinicians, designers, developers, and entrepreneurs. How is agile methodology transforming medicine, and what should pharma marketers know about this revolutionary new way of doing tech?

Dovetailing off the success of last year’s healthcare hackathon, the 2016 MIT Hacking Medicine Grand Hack recently spanned three days across three tracks: Chronic Conditions, Healthcare at Home, and Connected Health. Bringing together experts from software and hardware design to medical clinicians, pharma scientists, patient advocates, marketers, and healthcare entrepreneurs, participants formed teams to compete and create disruptive health solutions.

Throughout the hackathon pressing problems got pitched, experts mingled, teams formed, ideas got prototyped, business models were developed, and solutions presented. Check out the highlights and over 350 organizations taking part; by the end of the third day each team peddled their final presentations to a panel of esteemed judges across each track, with winners awarded for every category. The Twitter stream and FB page caught a glimpse.

MIT Hacking Medicine events are known in the Boston area as fertile networking grounds where paradigm changing healthcare innovations, and multi-million dollar ideas, have taken root. It was here that Elliot Cohen and TJ Parker conceived of PillPack, which raised $50 million dollars last June, and where the team behind Arsenal Health, recently acquired by Athenahealth, got their start.

This year at the 2016 Grand Hack, a new group of highly caffeinated hopefuls assembled with the aim of leveraging technology to address major problems in healthcare. On Saturday morning, physicians, UX designers, software engineers and business students split into teams of up to 6 participants and worked throughout the weekend to identify problems and develop technology enabled solutions that fell into three tracks: chronic conditions, healthcare at home, connected health.

As a healthy 26-year-old, I don't think about death often. But earlier this week, it was staring at me right back in my face, in the form of an app. The app was asking me questions about my final wishes, some I normally wouldn't have considered, like do I want my friends and family to have a stiff drink on the anniversary of my death?

After quick consideration, I decided, yeah, actually I would. It's a nice thought. But then it asked me a few questions in the form of yes or no statements that were harder to answer, like "I feel at peace with how I've lived my life so far" and "It is important for me to never be a burden to my loved ones." They were definitely harder than the ones asking if I wanted my funeral "to be a unique celebration of my life" or if "I have a backup plan for my online account passwords."