
AsianScientist (Aug. 13, 2015) – ‘Hackers’ are a slippery group to pin down. Once upon a time in the 1980s, Hollywood presented hackers as rebel youths who’d break into secured government computer systems and bring the Cold War-era world to the brink of nuclear war.
Today, we’re all hackers. We use Lifehacker.com to find clever ways to pack our socks, or we ‘Ikea-hack’ when we turn a bland Swedish shelving unit into a funky coffee table. But hackathons, with their intense 24 hour deadlines, take hacking to the next level.
Held over the weekend of July 25-26, 2015 at ITE Central, MIT Hacking Medicine@SG 2015 saw engineers, designers, entrepreneurs and health professionals come together in the race to build medicine’s next life-saving device.
An initiative of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) and Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), MIT Hacking Medicine@SG 2015 was the country’s first medical hackathon. The event was supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Hacking Medicine Institute, organizers of what they call the “Grand Hack” in Boston, the world’s biggest medical hack.
The theme of Singapore’s hackathon was ‘aging in place,’ an issue highlighted by Mr. Lee Hsien Loong, prime minister of Singapore, in a speech launching the Smart Nation initiative in November last year.
One in five people in Singapore will be 65 or older by 2030, and research shows that many seniors want to live in their own homes and not burden their families with their care. But with old age comes loss of mobility and conditions like dementia, which can make independent living impossible. The goal of this year’s hackathon was to find ways to make it possible for seniors to go on living independently in their own homes, alone or with their partners.
As Dr. Howard Califano, director of the SMART Innovation Center, said, it’s the wisdom of a room full of talented professionals that made the event special.
“This hackathon is unique in drawing together diverse groups, physicians, nurses and caregivers with engineers and programmers with business people, all coming together to form teams to solve medicine’s biggest problems,” Califano told Asian Scientist at the sidelines of the Hackathon.
At MIT Hacking Medicine@SG 2015, design, healthcare, business and technical professionals in equal numbers gathered to watch problem pitches that outlined the pain points in healthcare. Participants then mingled and compared interests, pitching solutions and forming teams to work through the rest of the day and night to prepare a final presentation the next day.
Teams weren’t just left to their own devices though; there were mentors on hand—experts from an array of medical and technical fields—to help teams that lack knowledge in a necessary field.
Some teams proposed using smart technologies to help seniors cope with chronic diseases and manage day-to-day social interactions, while others looked at harnessing smart tech like Skype or other telecommunication apps to enable seniors to receive care from their doctors without having to leave their homes.
But the S$9,000 first prize went to team CareGiver, which proposed an app to better connect seniors’ caregivers to their physicians. Second place prize of S$6,000 went to FoodNut, which leveraged smart tech to manage diabetes through a healthy and tasty diet. Creators of Jaga-Me, a platform matching mobile healthcare providers, won the third prize of S$3,000.
Teams were judged on how well they addressed challenge statements and designed the user experience, as well as their innovative and creative use of public data and the overall impact and value to end-users. Those with the best ideas were given opportunities to get funding for their life-saving gadgets and potentially develop them further.
Califano hopes that such hackathons will plant the seed of an innovative culture in Singapore, one that he wants to see grow.
As he tells Asian Scientist, “Hopefully, it will create a culture of medical hacking. It lets medical practitioners know that they can participate in a hackathon without needing to be programmers. The goal is to gather a diverse group of stakeholders—doctors, nurses, engineers, programmers and business types—to deconstruct big healthcare problems and reconstruct novel solutions.”
And healthcare will be where innovation counts the most. We can marvel at advancements in smartphones, online shopping or home entertainment, but in the end we will all need fresh ideas about how to keep ourselves and our loved ones alive and well.
Asian Scientist Magazine is proud to be a media partner of MIT Hacking Medicine@SG 2015.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: HackathonSG.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.