About 250 contributors registered for the Yale Heart for Biomedical Innovation and Expertise hackathon, drawing a various group to create modern options in healthcare.
Lucy Zha
Contributing Reporter
Courtesy of Kvon Pictures
The Yale Heart for Biomedical Innovation and Expertise held its first in-person healthcare hackathon for the reason that begin of the pandemic this week.
With about 250 folks registered to compete throughout 15 groups, the occasion kickstarted on Feb. 24 with keynote addresses on the hackathon’s theme, which this yr was “affected person engagement.” Individuals heard from Indira Negi, the deputy director of world well being on the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis.
The aim of the hackathon was to “present a chance for people who find themselves not clinicians or medical professions to sort out issues in healthcare,” in line with Monica Manmadkar, an undergraduate at Columbia College who additionally served because the hackathon’s promoting and advertising and marketing lead.
“In case you create an area of freedom and embrace a variety of individuals, lovely options can come up,” mentioned doctor govt Michael O’Brien MED ’16, who served as a mentor for the hackathon.
Hackathon contributors pitched their concepts in fast-paced one-hour conferences on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. Their tasks may fall into one in every of 4 tracks associated to this yr’s theme: personalised remedy, affected person monitoring, girls’s well being or digital therapeutics. Networking and crew formation started shortly after.
In 24 hours, contributors got here up with venture concepts starting from a webpage that gives instructional sources and neighborhood assist to oldsters of kids dealing with psychological well being and substance abuse to customizable journals that commemorate the medical journey of kids preventing with most cancers.
Individuals got here from all kinds of backgrounds, starting from highschool and undergraduate college students to professionals in varied fields resembling finance, advertising and marketing, enterprise operations and academia.
Hackathon participant Angelin Mathew ’25 mentioned that though her crew members got here from totally different components of the world, they might all testify to how stigma impacts sufferers’ healthcare experiences.
“It was my first hackathon, and it was so thrilling to see how a lot we had been capable of assume by means of and design in a weekend,” Mathew mentioned.
All through the competitors, there have been “floating mentors” and a “genius bar” which allowed contributors to realize early steerage from a crew of multidisciplinary mentors by means of apply
displays that befell previous to the ultimate presentation on Sunday. The mentors’ specialities included entrepreneurship, know-how, enterprise, drugs, science, design and legislation.
O’Brien, who labored as a mentor this yr, was truly a participant himself in 2020, and mentioned that the hackathon had been “life-changing.” Previous to the occasion, he had practiced drugs as a doctor for about 20 years. He discovered that the hackathon allowed him to mix his scientific experience with folks with backgrounds drastically totally different from his personal to resolve issues that in any other case felt stagnant in healthcare.
O’Brien’s son additionally joined the hackathon in 2021, which befell just about because of the pandemic. As a highschool pupil, he was “a grasp of Google Slides from faculty and designed the slide deck for his crew’s presentation,” in line with O’Brien.
The hackathon sparked O’Brien’s son’s enthusiasm for coding — two years later, he had already participated within the MIT Scratch program and taught himself Python.
The successful groups had been introduced on Sunday after contributors delivered a three-minute presentation of their venture adopted by two minutes of questions from the judges. Kyle Feliciano ’26 and Emily Qian ’26, two college students from the Yale College of Medication, received the honorable point out $1,000 prize with their app PlayFit, which goals to assist encourage bodily exercise in youth by means of online game incentives.
The app gathers “exercise indicators – like step depend, coronary heart fee, and common exercise degree – from the wearable know-how a toddler may already be utilizing,” after which gives the consumer with an in-game reward “after a certain quantity of exercise has been completed,” in line with an outline written by the crew.
The crew that received the $5,000 Grand Prize designed “Emma’s Story,” which is “a journal to be created by pediatric oncology sufferers documenting their journey of most cancers therapy, celebratory milestones, and constructive recollections,” in line with crew members Jhonatan Nagasako, Zora Duan, Obinna Anosike and Andrea Orane.
The venture thought emerged on Friday after a number of crew members recounted their private tales of battling ailments. They constructed prototypes of the journal in a single day out of FedEx cardboard containers, with cartoonish patterns and vibrant colours. They wished the journal to seem relatable to a toddler preventing most cancers.
“As a result of we had been such a small group, everybody’s thought[s] mattered,” Nagasako mentioned.
The crew will meet with advisors from CBIT and others from the Yale neighborhood to get additional suggestions on the design.
Mark Saltzman and Maxwell Laurans are the college co-directors of the Yale Heart for Biomedical Innovation and Expertise.
Correction 3/1: A earlier model of this text misstated the keynote speaker and O’Brien’s present occupation.