Hacknovate Health 2013
“The Hacknovate competition, which seeks to spur the creative use of IT to solve the daily living challenges of the frail elderly and their caregivers, is timely and meaningful. We need to drive more energy, fresh ideas, and practical solutions into healthcare IT to harness its potential to improve the quality of life, as our population ages at one of the world’s fastest rates.”
-Dr Chong Yoke Sin
Chief Executive Officer , Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS)
The inaugural Hacknovate Health 2013, held in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Smart homes and health Telematics (ICOST), successfully concluded on 18 June. Close to 100 participants turned up – some to support the presenting teams, some simply curious about the event and the inspirations within.
Hacknovate, a healthcare informatics competition that seeks solutions to real healthcare challenges from inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs, zoomed into four areas: medication, caregivers stress, social connectivity for elderly, and healthy eating. Over 30 excellent proposals with novel ideas in varying stages of research and/or development were received in the first round of online submission. The top 12 proposals were shortlisted and teams were paired with clinician mentors to help them develop their designs whilst ensuring their solutions remained relevant to the healthcare providers and users.
These 12 teams came from various academic and professional backgrounds, including the Institute of Infocomm Research, Nanyang Polytechnic, Nanyang Technological University, National University of Singapore, Singapore Polytechnic, Temasek Polytechnic and Whizmeal Pte Ltd. The judges consisting of clinicians, IT professionals, entrepreneurs and a game development director were impressed by the novelty of many proposals and the enthusiasm displayed by the teams. After a keen and close fight, the top 3 winners emerged:
First Prize
Sound-Eye: Elderly monitoring system
Team Sound-Eye - Institute of Infocomm Research
In Singapore, the number of elderly people living alone is expected to increase to 83,000 by 2030 – up from 35,000 now. Even though facilities such as railings, anti-slip floor tiles and ramp are installed, the chance of accidents occurring still exists. We propose “Sound-Eye” a revolutionary emergency alert system that employs sound event classification technology to detect abnormal sound events. Sound-Eye is carefully designed to address the need of stakeholders in terms of affordability, ease-of-installation and privacy protection. Should an emergency occur, Sound-Eye can detect the natural reaction of elderly verbally screaming for assistance instantly, thereby mediating the severity of the condition.
Second Prize
The Oracle: A platform that eases communication between the caregivers and their elderly patients using non-verbal visual media.
Team FortyTwo - Singapore Polytechnic
Our solution is based on insights from extensive research in the area of long term care of elderly patients in Singapore. The ORACLE uses a simple intuitive interface that enables the elderly to exactly convey what they want to the foreign domestic workers, who often are the primary caregivers. This in turn aims to relieve the caregiver of the stress of not understanding their patients and the frustration of not being able to do their job well.
Third Prize
Dementia and Assistance and Recall Engine (DARE)
Team Visual Source - Nanyang Polytechnic
The Dementia Assistance and Recall Engine (DARE) is designed to capture and organise the past memories in a personalized digital format. The aim of the DARE digital scrapbook, as part of reminiscence therapy, is to stimulate recall of past memories through photographs and other media that can be presented on a personal computer or tablet to remind the elderly and persons with dementia of their past. Of course, DARE is not just a digital scrapbook – it will have an active link to user’s brainwaves to analyse and make sense of their cognitive and mental abilities to help in stimulating their recall capabilities.
We thank everyone for their support of Hacknovate and we look forward to returning with even more exciting challenges and remarkable competition entries. In the meantime, keep hacking!
All the best,
The Hacknovate Team
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