Second TUH Health Hackathon showcases the future of innovation

Taking place over two days the second Health Hackathon run in TU Dublin Tallaght campus brought together over 40 students from the School of Enterprise Computing & Digital Transformation at TU Dublin as well as many other schools across the three campuses of TU Dublin. On Friday afternoon (30/09) the students were presented with five challenges set by clinicians in TUH.

Commenting on the event one of the judges and one of the creators of the challenges set for the students, Professor Catherine Wall, Consultant Nephrologist and Director of Quality, Safety & Risk Management at TUH said “I left the event with an immense sense of energy and possibilities for the future. I learnt a lot from the students over the weekend. We have strengthened collaborations between ourselves and TU Dublin and further fostered further relationships with very bright, very talented people. I am looking forward to seeing these ideas realised for our patients and staff but also to other healthcare settings in Ireland”.

Róisín Faherty, Head of Information Systems at the School of Enterprise Computing & Digital Transformation at TU Dublin said “Our students have generated amazing ideas in the 24 hours of the challenge. They have benefitted greatly from this experience, being presented with real healthcare challenges, getting to question clinicians directly, in-depth briefings from Amazon Web Services, presenting and communicating on their solution. This event is an incredible opportunity to enhance our students’ education”.

1^st Place: Warfarin Patient App the winning team of Andrzej Zero, Marta de la Cuadra Lozano, Jorge Jiménez García and Csanad Alattyanyi developed the concept of an app for home monitoring of patient’s on warfarin. The judges described the solution as ‘applicable, relevant, patient centred and hopefully something that they could see patients and clinicians using in the near future’.

2^nd Place: Weigh Up in the Clouds – Greg Marviak and Adrian Donnelly developed an app that will capture a patient’s weight both at home and in the Hospital. Having an accurate and up-to-date weight of a patient is key for medication prescribing, nutritional and fluid assessment that will be accessible by the patient and members of their clinical circle of care.

3^rd Place: Way Finder Jason Fung and Alan Byrne developed a way finder app to enable patients, families and new members of staff to navigate the campus using their mobile devices. A very practical and helpful development for a number of stakeholders.

The clinicians presented the challenges and the students were then broken into their working groups. They were each given time with the clinicians so they could ask more detailed questions, the understanding of the brief and development of the concept were very important elements of the final scoring.

Following the briefings there were a series of presentations from the Hospital, Amazon Web Services on Ethics, Data, Cyber Security and GDPR all very important elements for consideration as part of the development of any solution to the challenges set. Finally TU Dublin presented a technical presentation on fast prototyping using cloud services.

On Friday night at 9:30pm the briefings were finished and the students worked through the night in developing their solutions, the groups had their posters and some working prototypes following an initial round of judging on Saturday morning, the clinicians returned to the TU Dublin Synergy Building reviewing all of the posters before the finalists were announced and then undertook a final round of judging.