Why Engineering Students Should Consider Hacking Healthcare

Humanity is slowly headed toward a global healthcare crisis.

Modern medical and scientific advances take helped u.s. all live longer, just population growth puts us all in a bit of a bind. The Un predicts that the world's population will reach 9.6 billion by 2050, at which signal the number of people over 60 will double.

For many of the world's superlative academic institutions, the reply is to hack our way out of it. PCMag attended the recent Wellness++ hackathon at Stanford University'due south Schoolhouse of Engineering to check out the latest medtech innovations aimed at lessening that healthcare load.

Health hackathons are an increasingly pop mode for students to mingle with the medical community, only too venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. In Stanford'south case, this means networking with Silicon Valley technologists looking to license good ideas and take them global, hopefully arming nations with the etools to solve the healthcare problems of tomorrow.

From Chatbots to Surgical Robot Arms

The second annual Stanford Health++ hackathon brought 222 clinicians, engineers, production designers, business school-types, and curious hackers together in Stanford'southward Schoolhouse of Engineering. Selected from more than than 500 applications worldwide, the hackers came from as far away as Beijing, Oslo, Paris, and Tokyo to address affordability in healthcare worldwide.

Hackers spent the weekend pushing concepts to code, producing prototypes and detailed working documentation, and then presenting to judges. In the spirit of open-source development, many hackers published their lawmaking to GitHub afterwards. The $thirteen,000 in prize money was split amidst fifteen teams with sponsors looking for solutions in specific markets, such equally artificial intelligence (AI) within medicine or oncology.

How Chatbots Can Transform Your Business

Wellness++ co-organizers Cindy Liu and Ankit Singh Baghel explained the motivation behind the consequence.

"What'due south not bad about Health++ is that we're seeing a wide group of multidisciplinary teams, from all backgrounds, meeting to form solutions to pressing global healthcare problems," Baghel told PCMag.

Liu said she hoped people who hadn't considered participating in hackathons earlier would exist pleasantly surprised by the experience: "In dissimilarity, we're also hoping to inspire engineering science students to look at healthcare every bit a possible focus for their work."

Past Sun afternoon, the engineering science school was a hive of activity, covered in remains of hastily eaten burritos, bagels, and soda cans. PCMag roamed the different floors to peer over shoulders and check on progress as teams anxiously worked to finish their projects before the deadline.

Juliet Oberding, CEO of digital health company Predictably Well, led a multicultural team with members from Taiwan and Norway. "I'1000 an due east-patient entrepreneur and we're looking at autoimmune diseases in our project today," explained Oberding, whose Feasibly Well entry earned a prize that evening. The AI app is designed to help pregnant women with lupus discover early symptoms to help ensure healthier pregnancies.

Then in that location was the Rota++ team, the third Yard Prize winner, which built a projection called your pacifier. This project was a three-part hack: the app (built using Apple's Xcode and Swift programming languages for iOS), a 3D-modeling tool (Fusion 360) for the image device—which combined an Arduino sensor and a modified off-the-shelf pacifier—and a dashboard congenital using Ruby on Runway, HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

"I've been very interested in healthcare for a while and hoping to connect my computer science background to provide real world solutions," said Riku Arakawa, a University of Tokyo student on the team. "Our projection concerns the problem of rotaviral gastroenteritis, which is a serious public health problem in developed countries. We've created a bidirectional pacifier device for babies, which is both diagnostic, to assess the level of hydration, likewise equally dispense a rehydration solution, to forbid the need for hospitalization, except in extreme cases."

While walking the hackathon floor, information technology was interesting to come across that projects were frequently tied to specific regional health concerns. For example, several teams from the American due west wanted to use bioinformatics and natural language processing (NLP) to make doctors' lives easier, matching treatment codes to populate insurance billing forms. In a similar vein, the first Yard Prize went to MediBot, a chatbot designed to aid the 70 million Americans on Medicaid gain access to services.

In contrast, the team from China built a SimpleARM paradigm, a post-surgical robot arm banana designed to provide in-home robotic care for a vast, aging population.

Hacking Global Healthcare

Simply before the judges made their final conclusion, PCMag spoke to Health++ counselor Dr. Robert T. Chang, one of the judges. Dr. Alter too co-invented the EyeGo Smartphone imaging adapter at a previous Stanford hackathon, now a Digisight Technologies product called the PAXOS scope.

"This is my second twelvemonth as counselor and I'yard pleased to witness passionate teams who are tackling problems of significance and providing creative, viable solutions," said Dr. Chang. "Generally, students don't take that much exposure to the healthcare system, so they might think it's too heavily regulated or they don't know how to get started. Medtech hackathons begin to demystify the world of medical innovation in a fun, friendly way."

Dr. Chang was as well instrumental in opening upwards Wellness++ beyond the Bay Area this twelvemonth. He has helped spearhead global initiatives, including the Stanford-Peking University medical entrepreneurship graduate seminar in Beijing, and several hybrid biodesign hackathon seminars like Dreamcatchers Medtech Hackathon in Hong Kong and Health Innovation in Brazil.

"Healthcare issues are global in scope," he pointed out. "And then the Stanford Health++ hackathon provides a collaborative space for students from all over the earth to larn the biodesign process and to integrate cantankerous-cultural, multidisciplinary skills together, in society to create sustainable medical innovations for the future."

You can see the full list of Health++ winners hither. If any projects get spun out as commercial products, we'll follow their progress into the market.