Five School of Information students and alumni joined hundreds of other developers and designers Saturday for the sponsor's first-ever health data "hackathon".
Inspired by the vast amounts of health data recently released by the US government and others, more than two hundred developers, designers, data architects, and physicians joined forces in 35 teams for the one-day "Hacking 4 Health" hackathon, to develop applications based on the newly-released data.
The "Hacking 4 Health" hackathon was sponsored by HealthTap in partnership with Health 2.0 and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The I School team — first-year MIMS students Ram Joshi, Travis Yoo, and Evan M. Smith, plus class of 2010 grads Abe Coffman and Nat Wharton, along with several non–I School teammates — was one of three winners, winning a new iPad and the opportunity to compete in the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge on October 2. Winners were judged on creativity, impact, usefulness, technical competency and use of relevant data.
Their winning project, codenamed "OskiHealth", used information from the USDA Food Environment Atlas and the HHS Community Health Indicator to map county-level health metrics (on Google Maps) and identify the greatest opportunities for nutritional intervention. The goal of the project was to enable actionable intelligence for the public good.
The team built their application fully from scratch on Saturday. “We went to the event without any concrete ideas,” explained first-year student Travis Yoo. “When we first arrived at the venue, we started listening to other people's application ideas and thought over the competition, and we identified the datasets with the richest, most appropriate information. And unlike some other teams, we were able to build a simple system that could prove our concept.”
The team is looking forward to competing again in the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Code-a-thon on October 2 at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. The winners of the October 2 Code-a-thon will be invited to participate in the final competition, as part of the Health 2.0 conference October 7–8 in San Francisco.
“This hackathon was my first real developer challenge and it was a lot of fun,” said student Ram Joshi. “It was great collaborating with other I Schoolers. It was interesting to see how a group of people with diverse skill sets worked together to build a real solution.” His teammate Evan M. Smith agreed. “Hackathons are not just for hardcore developers. As more of a management-focused student, I was able to hone my team-building skills and meet people with real start-up experience,” said Smith
“I learned enormously at the event,” added Yoo. “We started the day full of excitement, and we really enjoyed the competition.”
