Hacking Health Challenges Announced
The Hacking Health hackathon to build health technology will be taking place on Friday February 26th – Sunday February 28th at McMaster Innovation Park!
The event will bring together software developers, healthcare professionals, designers, business/entrepreneurs, patients, students, and more, to work on solutions to health care technologies over a weekend. Participants will pitch ideas, form teams, get advice from experts, and build a health app in one weekend. Participants will present their finished product in front of a panel of judges for a chance of winning some fantastic prizes!
You can sign-up for tickets today! Early bird ticket sales end Sunday February 14th at 11:30pm!
Challenges
One of the best things about building health technology in Hamilton is that we have such an amazing, world-class base of knowledge and expertise to draw from all the health organizations in the area.
In addition to building an application related to something you or someone else has pitched at the beginning of the hackathon, participants at Hacking Health will have the option to work on one of the following specific challenges being posed by a local organization.
The great thing about working on one of these ideas is that, 1) it’s a known, real-world problem, and 2) you’ll have support at the hackathon from experts affiliated with these organizations. It’s an amazing opportunity that’s worth the price of admission alone!
PHRI: Evaluating Digital Cure
Health apps are like the wild west, with digital snake oil mixed in with gold-standard health apps and it’s hard to consumers to tell the difference. Population Health Research Institute knows the how to tell the difference from a research point of view, having conducted studies with more than 1,000,000 participants worldwide, more than 1,500 hospitals or clinical locations in 86 countries on every inhabited continent in the world.
Challenge: Now is your opportunity to build an app that will use Apple’s ResearchKit to find out which apps give effective outcomes.
PHAC: Step Up 4 Health
Do you need to get some exercise? Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Given that Public Health Agency of Canada’s goal is protects us from disease and injuries and infectious disease outbreaks – the obesity epidemic is a very real threat to our health. PHAC wants an app that they can use with their own staff and distribute to employers across the country.
Challenge: Building on the principles of the nudge and gamification theories, the “Step Up 4 Health” app will incorporate measurement tools to track stair use and have individual and group challenges as well as prompts, incentives, and a leaderboard.
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/index-eng.php
McMaster IIDR: Distributed Big Data for Drug Resistance
Bacteria are evolving the capacity to resist drugs faster than we can discover new drugs. Drug resistance death rates are rapidly increasing. Andrew McArthur’s lab fights resistance using Big Data and cloud computing. In his talk in January, Andrew identified a Big Data hack that he believes can make a difference in detecting and understanding the genomes of drug-resistant bacteria so that we can identify them faster and recommend tailored treatments that will maximize success and minimize the spread of resistance genes.
Challenge: The challenge is to create a peer-to-peer system that allows different research sites to upload and share SNP data from potentially drug-resistant pathogens.
A lab in Hamilton can sequence the genome of a pathogen to look for drug resistance genes, but in order to track it, they need to compare its SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphisms) with other labs in Canada and around the world. We know from SARS and current worries about C. difficile that we need to quickly find out if an outbreak is local or a serious national problem. This hack will allow centres from all over to easily compare and track outbreaks.
For background, check out this 10-minute video of Andrew McArthur talking about his lab’s work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fEIaUeUEb4 and http://mcarthurbioinformatics.ca/
The Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research (IIDR) at McMaster University is a world-leading centre of transdisciplinary infectious disease research. http://mcmasteriidr.ca
