HealthHack 2020 goes remote

Great news! HealthHack is running again in 2020 remotely!

We will be running the last two weekends in July 2020. 

Two weekends?! Yep we’re going to run over two weekends. 

HealthHack is  barely enough time when everyone is in the same room let alone all working from home so we are giving teams a little extra time to get their remote working setup going.

What does a remote HealthHack look like? Our best guess is:

• Problem owners will record videos of their pitches which will be made available on the HealthHack YouTube channel before the opening weekend

• Teams will be able to form before the first weekend if they like

• Final pitches will be recorded and made available on the HealthHack YouTube channel

• You have to get your own coffee & bananas

• The event will be open to anyone, anywhere.

This is the first time we’re running this remotely but we’re all experts at running HealthHack and many of us are experienced working remotely. If you’re keen to come but unsure of how you’ll be able to work remotely we’ve got you covered. The organising team are on hand, just like the normal events, to help make this work. 

What we need from YOU

• If you work in Health and Medical Research and there's a problem you need help with? Get in touch here ASAP: https://www.healthhack.com.au/submit-a-problem

• Want to hack? Got mad skills at running remote software/design teams and want to mentor? Want to help sponsor the event? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions: You’re champ! We’re laser focused on gathering problems so the event can actually happen but we’ll be in touch soon with the details of how you can help those problems get solved.

UPDATE

Tickets are on sale now for the low low price of free!

What did we deliver at HealthHack Brisbane 2018?

We had 180 sign ups for the event via our website. Whilst we didn’t take a roll at the event itself we estimate about 70% of them attended the event at some stage over the weekend.

Once again we had roughly a 50-50 split between male and female participants, with this year slightly favouring female participants. We also offered free childcare and had 3 parents sign up to take advantage of that.

We had 10 projects delivered on the Sunday night. Here’s what was pitched.

RT Seizure Prediction

Hardware and software platform for real time seizure prediction.

Epilepsy sufferers regard the unpredictability of seizures as the most distressing aspect of their illness. Being able to predict when a seizure will occur would largely reduce the fear these patients feel when carrying out normal activities such as being in a public space or driving a car. There is no wearable device that can produce reliable real-time alarms.

Problem Owner

Ruben Pellicer Guridi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruben-pellicer-70533a86/

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fy6g_M9QOyZmCP7qTHonQzO-vUgd1mKjRoHHwoQJ2Jk/edit?usp=sharing

Translate Sign Language

Translate sign language in real-time because of an inability to communicate over video using sign language.

The advent of real-time video chat has enabled people to communicate naturally regardless of their location. One group of people, however, have not experienced quite the same level of empowerment. People who can only communicate using sign language are limited to text chat when they need to communicate remotely, a medium with clear limitations. Perhaps most importantly, with the growing adoption of telehealth, deaf people need to be able to communicate naturally with health practitioners, regardless of whether the practitioner knows sign language.

Problem Owners

Kaamraan Kamaal - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaamraan-kamaal/

Tom Quirk - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-quirk/

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12WGlQ6g0sjuRFmI_jbMtsQ7VfGpaxiCFqcu-ue_jBTE/edit?usp=sharing

CareXchange

Secure private data sharing for health teams.

Despite all the advances in technology, healthcare continues to rely on paper, fax machine, internal mail and pager. These current modes of communication are simply inefficient, insecure, fragmented and do not offer clinicians a method of quick and easy communication for sharing/discussing clinical cases and handover information. To overcome this, medical professionals are using personal mobile devices to support their work, potentially compromising patient privacy and security.

Problem Owner

Maryam Jarahi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryamjarahi/

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zXHWjGocZGWpC93WGtRfDbcAgr8q2cyQzwu_bSnciZQ/edit?usp=sharing

Eat Me

Addressing malnutrition in hospitals by intelligent monitoring of patient meals.

Malnutrition remains a significant health issue for Australian hospitals affecting approximately 35-43% of patients. Evidence indicates malnutrition is associated with adverse outcomes such as prolonged length of hospital stay and frequent readmissions, increased risk of infection, falls, pressure ulcers, increased health-care costs and mortality.

Food waste within the hospital environment is another ongoing challenge for organisations, which has both environmental and economic impacts. Monitoring food waste to address this challenge is difficult due to the of resource intensive nature of collecting timely data of suitable quality and quantity.

Problem Owner

Russell Canavan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-canavan-b7b75736/

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YkefMSL7tzxvxvjiZbfPl82z3P9r8T87NEkHyY5dBvY/edit?usp=sharing

Ethics Tracker

Creating a robust and easy-to-use system for managing important documents relating to research in laboratories, particularly for ethical research approvals.

Whenever humans or animals are involved with a research study, investigators must first satisfy the wider community that the benefits of the research outweighs potential risk to the research subjects. To fulfil this obligation, investigators undertaking new research studies must submit an application to the appropriate institutional ethics committee beforehand. This application outlines the protocol that will be followed during the course of the study, and the steps taken to minimise harm to research subjects. What we need is a rigorous system that any laboratory can readily employ for easily managing these important documents.

Problem Owner

Dr Ryan Dean - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-dean-4917bb16a/

Slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/178xSNgejuOd4G8AzosC7pyzYavDv1f_todFhsEkFTik/edit?usp=sharing

Mediroo

Chatbot to improve health and medication adherence.

50% of Australians suffer from one or more chronic diseases and up to 70% of people forget what information their doctors told them post consultation within 15 minutes of leaving the clinic. As the Australian population ages, there is an increasing need to support the existing and struggling health infrastructure by providing valuable digital health interventions. No platform in Australia is publicly available which supports the ageing population to manage their medication through an SMS based service, which research suggests can provide beneficial adherence outcomes. We also understand that medication management is not only a problem of forgetfulness, rather a multivariate problem which can be encompassed by behaviours, beliefs and barriers.

Problem Owner

James Dight - https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-dight-b55112129/

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1foSULwQ9LfmGqlC8192cojvOl9O7K6IQ5dATaSR-7hY/edit?usp=sharing

ML for Medical Imaging, MLMedic

Easy-to-use GUI to help clinicians and scientists measure and visualize the brain using advanced machine learning (ML) Techniques.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans are used by clinicians to diagnose and treat many common neurodegenerative diseases and disorders including Alzheimer’s dementia. To measure the progress of these, and to understand healthy brain functioning, brain images can be ‘segmented’ and visualized using many software packages and tools in Linux with specific dependencies.

We would like to implement a user-friendly cross-platform interface that reads-in MRI (DICOM) data from a clinic or research institution, and provides accurate brain segmentations using ML that can be used as an assistive tool for diagnosis and tracking of disease and disorder. We will call this “Machine Learning for Medical Imaging”, MLMedic, which could automatically detect tumors and growths and measure their size and shape. We would like to design a GUI that applies pre-trained ML models on data collected in the clinic for an easy ML interface for the masses.

Problem Owner

Thomas Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-shaw-b7419059/

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1s-Y3xDmLd11MghzsosWadlDrET5UgRO9idWkw0WyMvk/edit?usp=sharing

OkToTalk

Automatically recommending suitable psychologists for people based on their needs, preferences, and demographics.

Many people have trouble finding a psychologist they ‘click’ with. Millions of Australians never seek the help they need, and many of those who do give up after one session, or waste money and emotional energy ‘auditioning’ multiple psychologists.

Our service currently makes automated recommendations for some website visitors with human clinicians contributing guidance and recommendations about half the time. The recommender system is hand-tuned. The amount of human involvement makes it hard to serve the large number of people looking for help.

Problem Owner

Matthew Beauregard - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbeauregard/

Slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1uWhBmlG9y1qb9SiayHr_wWRlgtWfD5P9LQ-M2PPKMjU/edit?usp=sharing

Open Heart Project – Smart Maps

Create a database of heart failure and mechanical circulatory support statistics.

The OpenHeart Project (https://openheartproject.org) , currently lead by the Innovative Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology Laboratory (ICETLAB), is an open-source online research project which aims to improve research practices within the field of mechanical circulatory support and ultimately improve outcomes and quality of life of heart failure patients around the globe. OpenHeart Project currently maintains a  collaborative platform to share designs and testing for mechanical circulatory support.

To complement this, the OpenHeart Project would like to curate and display dataset around heart failure and mechanical circulatory support.

Collating this data will open up multiple opportunities for new research and improved outcomes. As an immediate short-term translation the database can function as an educational tool for students, researchers and the general public interested or working in the field of mechanical circulatory support. Furthermore, the database can be a starting point to consider big data / machine learning and model predictive tools to predict future trends in mechanical circulatory support.

Problem Owners

Jo Pauls - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo-philipp-pauls-852b48ab/

Nicole Bartnikowski - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-bartnikowski-b77aba9a/

Slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Gbp_b55bnGjOibaptYY2yE7vg-TpwR-yg-k2QQZ6Qfk/edit?usp=sharing

RT Biofeedback Visualisation

Real-time data visualisation for biofeedback rehabilitation: looking into what happens in people’s muscles and tendons to create better treatments.

Osteoarthritis and tendinopathies are painful conditions that affect more than 30% of Australians, resulting in poor quality of life. Despite decades of research, conservative treatments for these diseases are still limited to drugs to manage pain and no other cure exist. More recently, exercise programs to strengthen muscles have shown promising results in reducing pain, but outcomes vary across people and stages of disease, making a generic one-size-fits-all approach ineffective. What is required is a novel and personalised approach to promote tissue regeneration within the human body.

We are now able, via digital twins, to calculate all the biomechanical variables that affect tissue health in an individual, but these need to be visualised in real-time, so they can be instantaneously changed to bring them back to optimal level.

Problem Owner

Claudio Pizzolato - https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudio-pizzolato-0b03b34a/

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Y_SltQmEBJBgt0Rj6d5M0hq2G_LL9iwwRia18egMxy4/edit?usp=sharing

Want to learn/see more?

See all the action from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bystandr/albums/72157693193234871. You are welcome to use any of these pictures as they licenced under Creative Commons, but please remember to credit photos to Dr Nick Hamilton. Twitter is best: https://twitter.com/DoktrNick @DoktrNick

You can check out all the code from the weekend (and all other HealthHack events) at our Github: https://github.com/HealthHackAustralia/HealthHackAustralia/blob/master/README.md

Finally you can follow us on our social media to stay up to date with all the HealthHack latest

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HealthHackAu

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/18282422/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1l1itVMUJ26TVz3BaBx_Dg

HealthHack was proudly fueled by bananas...

Meet your 2018 Brisbane HealthHack Judges

We've always been lucky at HealthHack to recruit wonderful judges and 2018 is no exception to that trend. Here are the 2018 judges of Brisbane HealthHack.

Jason Lowe

Twitter: @jlowe000
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lowe-jason/

Jason Lowe is one of the Co-Founders of Hacking Health Queensland, a chapter of Hacking Health Global which is a not-for-profit organisation acting both locally & globally to connect stakeholders, enable #innovation, #entrepreneurship, & change, to improve #health for all. Jason spends his time during the day working at Oracle heading up #AppDev and #DevOps initiatives in the region and contributes to the community building activities in the Oracle ecosystem, the health ecosystem with Hacking Health and within the corporate / startup ecosystem.

Kate Devitt

Twitter: @skdevitt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skdevitt/

Kate Devitt is a philosopher and cognitive scientist researching and building ethical, research-backed and engaging decision support systems for adoption. She is co-founder and CEO of BetterBeliefs, a social platform for evidence-based strategic decision making. Based on Bayesian rationality, BetterBeliefs clients include a global online travel company and a QLD emergency services organisation. Her research includes: the ethics of decision support tools, barriers to the adoption of digital agricultural technologies; the trustworthiness of autonomous systems; and the impact of agricultural robots on human rights

Professor Ranjeny Thomas
MBBS (WA), MD (WA), FRACP, FAAHMS

Professor Thomas is Professor of Rheumatology at University of Queensland, Translational Research Institute, consultant rheumatologist at Princess Alexandra Hospital and fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.
Her research seeks to understand autoimmune disease and restoration of immune tolerance. Through this work, she developed and tested the first rheumatoid arthritis vaccine. She has also contributed major insights into how the microbiome is involved in causing spondyloarthropathy leading to the development of disease biomarkers and therapeutic strategies. Ranjeny is founder and a director of the spin-off company, Dendright, which is developing immunotherapy for autoimmune diseases.

Health Hack 2017 review - Problems Solved

Organiser Roisin McMahon leads off the closing ceremonies

We saw some great stuff achieved at this year’s HealthHack. You can see details of the problems that were pitched on website and see the action from the weekend on our Twitter and Linkedin. You can really dig into the details at our GitHub (our projects are open source), see videos from events at our YouTube playlist, or read some of the wonderful articles our participants have written and/or have had written about them.

Brisbane

We saw a wonderful range of projects delivered at the Brisbane node. You can get a really good feel for the event via Roisin McMahon’s review or Nick Hamilton’s photos. We surveyed our problem owners after the event and we’ve included some of their feedback below as well.

Team Show me MND built an application to enable individuals with motor neuron disease to self-report symptoms to optimise their health care. They won 2nd place. 

Describe HeathHack 2017 in 5 words: Inspiring, well organised, positive vibe

What progress did you did you make towards solving your problem? We got a working prototype of the App by the end of the HealthHack.

What has happened since the event? We are now working with some members of the team developing a more extensive prototype, also planning on full development and maintenance of the app. Depending on funding. We have applied for funding, grant outcomes expected mid 2018.

Would you recommend HealthHack to other problem owners? Yes

Show me MND hard at work, they were our largest team at HealthHack Brisbane

Team Birth Advisor created a database to help mums choose the best place to birth. One of their coders, Tracy, won our Supreme Coder award.

Describe HeathHack 2017 in 5 words: Brilliant

What progress did you did you make towards solving your problem? Networked and built a "bare bones" website that we're planning on finishing in 2018

What has happened since the event? Have networked and showed what we built to various govt departments. We are planning on using it to apply for grants in 2018.

Would you recommend HealthHack to other problem owners? Yes

Alecia, with baby in tow, leading Birth Advisor

Team Yarning created a culturally sensitive app using storytelling to help end-of-life care for indigenous people. They won 1st place and the Design Award. Since HealthHack the app Yarning worked on has continued to be developed and is one step closer to being made available to the public.

Yarning accepting their first place

Team 24x7 Vitals measured fatigue symptoms with discrete tech to help people preempt medical emergencies.

24x7 Vitals forming a team on Friday night

Team Andra built an Alexa bot on top of a robot platform that conducts conversations about your emotional state, and responds appropriately. They won 3rd place.

Describe HeathHack 2017 in 5 words: Exciting productive fun challenging rewarding

What progress did you did you make towards solving your problem? We managed to make a new build for the code what was previously running

Would you recommend HealthHack to other problem owners? Yes

Andra and their robot just before judging on Sunday

Team Clinic2Cloud worked on anonymous (with defacing) clinical image processing for the cloud. They used docker and cloud services to build a complete image processing pipeline in 12 hours.

Describe HeathHack 2017 in 5 words: Fun weekend, with interesting people.

What progress did you did you make towards solving your problem? We designed the application and developed a quite mature prototype.

What has happened since the event? Written two articles about it. Met the team once for drinks. Are planning to meet again for coding in Feb and applying for funding to pay for the cloud costs.

Would you recommend HealthHack to other problem owners? Yes

Clinic2Cloud during pitch practice

Team PhinD! Worked on connecting PhD students and providing support for their mental health. It was designed to help improve wellness for PhD students - a very important resource for a very important problem.

Describe HeathHack 2017 in 5 words: challenging, fun, exciting, stimulating, soporific

What progress did you did you make towards solving your problem? Implemented app and basic text analytics

What has happened since the event? Got our project into iLab

Would you recommend HealthHack to other problem owners? Yes

PhinD! pitching on Sunday

Sydney

Sydney was a shorter event than Brisbane but that didn’t mean we saw any less fantastic projects delivered.

Team OzMosis delivered "Intent" an education solution that acts as a single source of objective, yet relatable, data about fertility issues.

OzMosis's final pitch

Team CardioSurf’s created a visualisation tool to condense various types of heart rate monitoring data into one experience for timely evaluation and feedback.

CardioSurf's final pitch

Team Hackers.1 delivered Genome Decision Makers an automated genomic data visualisation tool.

Hackers.1's final pitch

Team MTP Connect delivered grant search system, which is an aggregator for multiple grant databases.

MTP Connect's final pitch

Team Hello Sunday Morning addresses alcohol problems by focusing on supporting and leveraging the relationships around the drinkers to help people “change together”.

Hello Sunday Morning's final pitch

Team Phyiso ROM created a cloud based AI that tracked the progress of Range of Motion (ROM) abilities of physiotherapy patients using Computer Vision. They won 1st place.

Physio ROM's final pitch

Team OntoClick delivered a Chrome extension that turns your messy biomedical data into a beautiful standard ontology term with just one click. They won 3rd place.

OntoClick's final pitch

Team Cancer Trial Matcher automated and improved visibility of available and relevant clinical cancer trials. They won 2nd place.

Cancer Trial Matchers's final pitch

Team SANA Digital Health worked on delivery of digital health to the elderly. They took out the innovation award.

SANA Digital Health's final pitch

Thanks to ....

Dr Nick Hamilton's wonderful photos. Find him on Twitter at @DoktrNick  and his photos on Flickr at interestedbystandr

Thanks as well to our wonderful sponsors, without which nothing happens.

HealthHack Melbourne 2015 participant stories

Monika Buljan

I was one of the project owners for Healthhack 2015 in Melbourne. It was also my first time at a hack-a-thon which I thought would be fun to do. I was a little nervous about participating but I had a lot of support from my work, peers and the Statistical Society Vic Branch. I went in, not really knowing what to expect, trying to keep expectations low. I had half a dozen people who joined the team. They had various skills, worked well together and we all learned many new things. The solution exceeded my expectations. Back at work, I presented the outcomes to some team leaders and they were impressed and excited as me. They want to take the project to the next level with funding and support from our senior leadership team. I highly recommend participating and bringing your projects along, as you never know what it may turn into. Bring on next year!

Jessica Kasza

I had a great time at Health Hack 2015. I brought two problems along, and was lucky enough to find people interested in both of them. Because of the efforts of these motivated health hackers, I’ve now got tools that I can use to further my research into comparing the performance of health care providers and investigating the changing treatments of dialysis patients. Seeing what the hackers in my teams came up with wasn’t the only fantastic thing about Health Hack: I really enjoyed getting to meet the hackers, other problem owners, and organisers. A brilliant weekend!

Pip Griffin

We came to Healthhack with a very specific problem: we wanted a tool that would help researchers upload new genome and annotation files to our online Genome Browser, without having to use the command line or run scripts. We soon assembled a team of people with a good mix of programming and design skills, and by the end of the weekend they had come up with a functional GUI that looks beautiful and only needs a little bit more work to be ready to roll out in the lab. This will be useful for labs all around the world, as researchers are assembling more and more genomes and need straightforward ways to make them publicly accessible. I was really impressed with the dedication and hard work of all the participants. It was an inspiring and fun event!

David

This was my first HealthHack and I was blown away by the level of skill and dedication of not just my own team, but everyone else's as well. There were some amazing and ambitious projects and I was impressed with how these were presented and taken up by the participants. My own team developed organically, after one participant committed (thanks Alexia!), a diverse team followed soon after. They immediately began analysing the project, and it became clear that the team had the perfect combined skills to get the project started. The venue was great, as was the catering, as was the childcare provisions. The dynamic between nerds from different disciplines was electric, and it was such a fun weekend I am hoping to come across some more problems for future Health Hacks.

Sydney Judges Announced!

Kris Howard

Director of Developer Relations at YOW! Australia

Kris Howard has been building websites in one form or another for over twenty years. She's been a developer, a business analyst, and a manager; and most recently wrangled engineers at Canva, one of Australia's fastest growing startups. She now heads up Developer Relations for YOW Conferences, meeting and working with developers around the country. She's spoken at meetups and events across Australia and Asia, including TEDx Melbourne. Her Instagram account is pretty much all selfies and food.

ALEX Gilleran

Senior Software Engineer at CSIRO Data61 and Hackathon Organiser

Alex Gilleran is a long time organiser of Random Hacks of Kindness in Sydney in addition to being a Senior Developer at CSIRO Data61. He has worked across commercial projects for IBM, government and in agencies in Australia and the USA. Currently he works on the open source projects Terria and the open government portal MAGDA.

MARTIN DUUSMA

Partner at Main Sequence Ventures

Martin Duursma joined Main Sequence Ventures in June, 2017.  Martin has over 25 years experience as a Senior Executive, Technologist, Business Founder, Angel Investor and Mentor both in Australia and the US. Prior to joining Main Sequence Martin was a senior executive with a range of global responsibilities at Citrix.  Martin joined Citrix in 1997 when it acquired Datapac Australasia, a company which he co-founded. While at Citrix Martin started and built the company's research arm, Citrix Labs, started and led the CTO Council and CTO function and also started the Citrix Accelerator and led the investment in over 30 new companies.   As VP and head of the Global Technology Office, Martin led due diligence in over 60 transactions totalling $2.5B in value.

Martin continues to be active as an angel investor as well as in various advisor and mentor roles at Macquarie University, Sydney University and ON, Australia’s national science technology accelerator and as board trustee at the Computer History Museum, CA USA. Martin holds a Bachelor of Computer Science and a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Sydney University.

KELSEY SCHWYNN

General Manager, Today Sydney

Kelsey is the General Manager for Today's Sydney studio. She has a background in product strategy and business design, having worked at large agencies in the US, including frog design, Huge and IBM. She is passionate about human-centred design and volunteers with organisations that teach the tenets of design thinking to young people.

Kelsey has a deep love for all things service design and making a positive, measurable impact through her work. Kelsey has instigated Today’s approach to ensuring that every project we do delivers on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Today is a strategic design company for people and planet. In a time of complex challenges and limitless possibility, we need to work together to create a better tomorrow. Our role is to help people collaborate.

OLDOOZ DIANAT

Revenue NSW

I received my B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from The University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, M.Sc. in Computer Science from University Technology Malaysia (UTM), Johor Bahru, Malaysia, and Ph.D. (2014) in Computer Science from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. The topic of my PhD thesis was "Representing and Reasoning about Bayesian Games with Epistemic Logic". My supervisors were Prof. Mehmet Orgun and Dr Lee Flax. Prior to joining Macquarie University as a PhD Candidate, Tutor and Adjunct Lecturer, I worked at international industries as System Executive and Software Programmer. During my PhD I did my internship as a Software Engineer at CISIRO on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval research. I left academia on April 2016 and joined public sector, Revenue NSW, as a Data Analyst. My current research interests lie in the areas of computational intelligence, deep learning, and formal methods.

Deb Redelman

Centre Co-ordinator at Australasian Community Genetics Program

Debbie has been a qualified Associate Genetic Counsellor since 1993.  Initially working in the Perinatal Statistics Unit, then going on to be the State Co-orinator for the Tourette Syndrome Association, and as the Centre Co-ordinator for the Australasian Community Genetics Screening Program since 1996, as well as relief counsellor for the Drugs in Pregnancy and Breastfeeding Hotline. 

She was a committee member of the Association of Genetic Support for 5 years, being Chair for 2 years.  She was a Project Development Officer for the Department of Medical Genetics at the Children's Hospital at Westmead.  Notable achievements were US$150K grant in 1999 and the establishment of the Discipline of Medical Genetics at Sydney University.

She has served on the board of Wolper Jewish Hospital for 10 years, serving on the Community Programs committee for 5 years as well as other committees.

She was a committee member of the NSW Human Genetics Society for 9 years, and treasurer of the National Scientific Meeting for 2 years.  This included being a judge of the Student Prize for 3 years.  She is still a committee member for the Birth Defects Society, and has been for 11 years, being treasurer for the last 5 years.

She has served on the R&D reference panel for the Alpaca Association for 4 years, as well as Junior Alpaca Handler Judge for the Castle Hill Show for 5 years.

She has presented both Oral and Poster presentations for the HGSA Scientific meetings, and was a recipient of the Meryl Smith Encouragement Award for Professional Development in Genetic Counselling.

3 Very New Things at This Year’s HealthHack Sydney

Kelly Sikkema Unsplash

We heard your feedback, and we’re trialling a few things that are a bit new.

Liz, Laura, Liviu and Eliot have some new team members (Weller, Jonathon, Katrina and Yan) this year and some big changes. We're really excited to see how it all works out and (as always) we will be keen to have feedback from you at the end of the hack!

1. We are forming a partnership with Random Hacks of Kindness Sydney

This year we will have a judge on our jury from Random Hacks of Kindness who will be assessing whether some projects can go into the Random Hacks of Kindness cycle (as well as a coder). If you’re not familiar, RHoK is 2 times a year and a project can (and often does) go through the 2 day hack multiple times before moving on.

Let me explain why we’re doing this - we are attempting to solve a really long term problem. A continuous piece of feedback we get is that there is no space to continue project work after the hack. We get it. Life happens, people drop out of projects, and sometimes good intentions don’t work out. Random Hacks is able to put these problems into their cycle and bring other hackers into the group. This could ensure long term viability for some of the problems.

We have chosen Random Hacks of Kindness both because it is run by people we trust (Liz's brother is an organiser) and because we share the same ethos. Random Hacks has long been promoting non profit open source hackathons just as HealthHack has been since its inception. HealthHack has the unique proposition of getting problem owners ready to hack even though a hackathon might not be on their radar. HealthHack has always been more experimental because we are about helping problem owners who might not be ready for a RHoK without the HealthHack to give them an idea of how a hackathon might help them out. We’re excited for the results and the next RHoK hopefully will have some HealthHack problems going through to the next stage.

If you’re a super keen string bean, and you want to do RHoK as well as HealthHack, the team forming night for the next RHoK is November 15 and you can RVSP on Meetup. The Summer RHoK is on November 25 which is also a Meetup RVSP.

2. We are trialling an express format

Noticed that HealthHack is a bit shorter than last year? Well the new format is an attempt to see what we can achieve in a day. We realise a lot of people are not able to give up an entire weekend but really want to join in and we’ve seen other hacks give this a try. We want you to return to work/study on Monday not completely burned out by a hackathon and we think this is important. We’re trying to pack a lot in and have poured a lot of effort into supporting you all as much as possible this year.

3. Cicada Innovations is going to teach you how to pitch

We are INCREDIBLY fortunate to have Cicada Innovations on board with us this year to run a pitch workshop for a member of your team that will give the final pitch to the judges. If you don’t know, Cicada run an incredible Medical Device Innovation Program delivered with NSW Health. Ignition CORE - Cicada’s course for healthcare entrepreneurs IS FREE. OF. CHARGE. I know right? I was completely shocked. Applications  for Ignition CORE close November 22 and there’s one more information night after HealthHack on November 7 at Cicada, which you can register for on Eventbrite.

Cicada are also giving away 1 month incubation at Cicada Innovations in our Accelerator Hub (valued at $500). Have I not already convinced you these are incredible people? This is a great opportunity, do not miss out.

Brisbane Judges Announced!

We are delighted to announce our judges for Brisbane this year. 

Lee Constable

Lee Constable is the host of Scope, a science TV show for kids aged 7-14, produced by Network Ten in cooperation with CSIRO. Lee loves combining science with media and the arts. She was a presenter in the Questacon Science Circus in 2015 while gaining a Master of Science Communication Outreach, started a youth-run radio show called SoapBox focused on social justice and sustainability, and is the founder of Co-Lab: Science Meets Street Art where scientists collaborate with street artists to communicate their research to the public though large murals that the public can watch evolve. In 2018 Lee will be one of 80 international women in science heading off with Homeward Bound on an Antarctic voyage with a focus on leadership development and addressing climate change.

Find Lee on: Twitter @Constababble, Instagram @Constababble, Facebook, and LinkedIn 

Dr Alison Rice

Prior to 2012 Dr Alison Rice trained and worked with pioneers in bone marrow transplantation developing new therapies to improve patient outcomes. Now as Research Development Manager at Griffith University Alison draws on her extensive knowledge of the biomedical research sector to identify and manage strategic research opportunities for Griffith. She is a strong advocate for women in science and provides mentorship for her staff, students and colleagues. Involved with Women In Technology since 2008, Alison joined the Board in 2015 and was appointed Co-President in 2017. As Co-President, she generates positive impact on the careers of women in science by addressing challenges faced, and creating inclusive opportunities to access resources and people. Her goal is to provide strategic leadership for all researchers to maximise their opportunities and the impact of their research.

Find Alison on: Twitter @alison_mrice and LinkedIn

Dr Siegfried Perez

Technology has always been a part of Siegfried’s geek life starting from the time he first learned programming on his Atari 1050 disk drive back in the late 1980s. When he decided to study medicine, all his aspirations in computer science took a back seat for anatomy and pharmacology books. Finally finishing his fellowship training in emergency medicine in 2015, some 18 years after high school, he decided to combine computer science with health research and begin a new journey on a PhD on data extraction of clinical data from electronic health

records. He hopes this new endeavor will improve health processes and outcomes for patients and their families.

Find Siegfried on: LinkedIn

Dr Robert McLeay

Dr. Robert McLeay founded DoseMe in April 2014 after two years of prototype development, combining his interest in modelling biological data with his background in IT to provide safer, and more effective precision dosing to patients via easy-to-use software designed for clinicians rather than researchers. Robert originally led software development teams to successfully deliver complex projects to hundreds of thousands of users before completing a PhD in Bioinformatics, using computational techniques to model and understand genetic and biological data. Robert has applied modelling and bioinformatics to a range of fields, and has published in areas including genomic data analysis, developmental biology, glioblastoma, and schizophrenia research. He combines both his medical and IT interest in DoseMe, providing access to the current best-practice dosing - precise, individualised dosing - to hospitals across Australia, the EU, and the USA.

Find Robert on: Twitter @robmcleay and LinkedIn

My first Hackathon! Jazz Hands

I had my first hackathon three weeks ago. So much fun! 
So what did I build?
An app to display pre-existing captions in the cinema for the deaf and hearing impaired. Sounds cool? Read on.

The Problem

Deaf people can’t hear movies. I’m deaf. I use this. It is essentially a giant dongle that sits in the cupholder and displays the captions of the movie. For me it is awesome.

A wonderful concept, but executed poorly

However this large paraphernalia is large and embarrassing to parade around with. None of my deaf friends use it. Sometimes I arrive at the cinemas and the dongle is flat. That really ruins my evening. A flat dongle is pretty useless. I wish I could just pull out my phone and watch the captions like this instead…

Got my captions on my phone!

I already have the subtitle file (its online). So I made an auto syncing caption player.

I decided to use a voice recognition API, and listen for parts of the audio, and “fire” the caption player in time with the movie. It sounds so simple, but it took a whole weekend! (A more detailed explanation of the problem)

The cool things I learned while doing this hack:

Delegation

Delegating to other team members is difficult. But if you find a nice chunk of self contained work and hand it off properly you can literally clone your efforts! Haha super powers!

Swift is changing swiftly

Swift (the iOS language) is a slippery beast. A wonderful clean language in violent flux. Every snippet in StackOverflow, needs a few dozen changes before it works which tends to shake my confidence.

Also, searching for answers to 'swift' problems tends to get this result:

Searching for answers on swift related problems...

Apple loves squeezing money out of you

Signing apps in Xcode sucks. I had so many headaches trying to deploy to my actual device. Apple is starting to restrict the usage of certain API’s (siriKit) to those with a $150 paid developer licence. That really sucks. Apple also only allows 10 app IDs every 7 days for an unpaid developer. Be warned.

Apple charges you to build things for them : (

People with different skill sets teach surprising things

While my dad (yes he was hacking away too) was building the subtitle player, I paired with Brian, a fellow from Queensland Health IT. He works in IT support. He was dubious about his value as a hacking dev but together we were awesome.

Go Team!

Pairing with Brian kept the up the momentum and armed me with a fresh set of eyes. As an administrator he had excellent experience in making sense of error logs and hunting down hidden configurations when we were wiring things together. I learned a lot from his approach.

With 2 hours to go, I finally had a viable demo to show the judges! Commit! Push! Beer!

We got second place! However the real reward was enjoying my Steve Jobs moment in front of the judging panel. I played the movie, started the app… and hey presto! The captions appeared and synchronised perfectly!

Thanks to all who helped run the event. I will be a big advocate for this one next year!
And a very special mention to my Perth counterparts who completed a beautiful user interface in a sister project during the same hack!

Brisbane 2016: The Winners

The HealthHack 2016 Brisbane event was held at River City Labs. It ran from Friday night to Sunday afternoon (14-16 Oct 2016).

HealthHack is a different hackathon event in that it brings the problems to the hackers. There’s no need to validate the market or the value proposition as the problems come from researchers and staff working in the health & sciences fields.

Whatever team you end up working on you know that what you’re doing is important.Whatever you can do to aid in solving your team’s problem is guaranteed to make a big difference out in the real world.

Every team did something interesting and valuable at HealthHack and I’d encourage you to check out the HealthHack website to see the details of all of these.

I’ve focused only on the winners from the Brisbane event here, but the prizes are only there as icing on the cake. The real rewards are working on the problems themselves and working with the problem owners. That’s what I really love about HealthHack: No matter what happens everyone ends up winners.

Speaking from the point of view of someone who was part of a team that didn’t win anything this year, but who was part of the team that took out first place last year, I can honestly say the satisfaction I got from both events was the same.

I have some other posts if you want to read more about our team’s experience at HealthHack or the solution that we pitched.

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

Super Friends Against Superbugs

Problem Pitch

Using the newly developed thumb drive-sized MinION genome sequencer and the fast results it provides, Miranda and Alan pitched a project to track the spread of antibiotic resistance in real time. You can see a detailed explanation of the problem on the HealthHack website.

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Working on the project

This was a really ambitious & talented team and they worked on a lot of different features that leveraged the MinION device data. They ended up delivering prototypes for most of them.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Final Pitch

The Superbugs team came up with a prototype web app that generated reports for medical staff and displayed outbreaks on a map. Most of all they significantly improved the speed at which this was able to be done as compared to the existing systems. It was no surprise they took out first place.

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Jazz Hands

Problem Pitch

The problem Julian Scharf pitched was taking the existing subtitles device provided by movie theatres for deaf people into an app. The problem was coming up with a alternative solution for cueing the subtitles to match the movie that was being played on the theatre screen on a device that was less obtrusive and more accessible than what is currently used (your own phone). “Jazz Hands” is sign language for applause, a very appropriate team name for this project. 

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Working on the project

This team worked in co-operation with another team in Perth who had formed around the same problem (which had been pitched over there as well). They were the only team spread over two locations at HealthHack.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Final Pitch

The team got a prototype app working that used voice recognition to help identify the place to cue the subtitles so they would be in-sync with the movie playing. They bravely did a live demo in their pitch and….it worked! They were a very popular second place.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

Hungry Cells “Saving Grandpa”

Problem Pitch

Jerome Goldstein pitched finding a way to manage cardiology patients and their data more efficiently. Currently the management of patient progress through the various stages of cardiology treatment is kept in a series of Excel spreadsheets which need to be manually updated as new information is collected. You can see a detailed explanation of the problem on the HealthHack website.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Working on the project

This was one of the smallest teams at HealthHack, but they still managed to produce quite a lot over the weekend.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Final Pitch

The team delivered a working database to replace the current spreadsheet so that patient information could be updated and accessed securely and easily by all medical staff. The database they built they actually deployed on QLD health’s servers thus proving it could be used in production. They picked up a well deserved third place.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

Design Award winners

The Design Awards went to 5 teams: We've Got Guts, Stemflow, Urban Jungles, Super Friends Against Super Bugs, and Jazz Hands.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Spirit of HealthHack winners

Myself, Elliot Smith & Mark Promnitz won the Spirit of HealthHack awards.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Elliot's team spent the weekend dealing with a very difficult dataset that comprised individual brain map files which were terabytes in size. Combined with that the existing project had an enormous codebase that took ages for the team to compile before they could even get started. This problem had been brought to last year’s HealthHack and although it interested many people, the complexity of the dataset combined with the size of the images scared everyone off. Elliot’s team took maybe the hardest problem from this year’s HealthHack on.

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

I didn’t find a team to join on the Friday so I spent the time going around to the teams and helping them work through their problems to try and see all the possible angles they could attack them from. On Saturday I joined up with a problem owner, Dr Kenan Kalayci, and a couple of other people who hadn’t found teams to do a project for the problem Kenan had brought to HealthHack; overcharging and overtreatment in the dental market. Throughout the hack, as well working with my team, I dropped in on other teams and talked over problems they were working through and offered up an alternative viewpoint to help them with their problems.

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

image courtesy of Randall Austin

Mark ended up leaving the team he had originally come to HealthHack with to join the We've Got Guts team led by problem owner Jake Begun who wanted to track and predict disease activity in IBD (inflammatory bowel disease). The team originally didn’t have any coders so Mark joined them to help round out their skillset. Mark played a major role in the prototype they delivered and the final pitch. The team couldn’t have done it without him.

image courtesy of Randall Austin

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

Supreme Coder winner

Thea Koutsoukis won the supreme coder award. She worked with the Hungry Cells team who picked up third place. The team ended up deploying a .NET application which Thea worked on. The interesting thing here is Thea had no .NET experience before this weekend but was still able to hack something together, that worked, over the weekend. A worthy supreme coder winner indeed.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Picture perfect

The pictures in this article came from a few sources. Each picture has a link in it out to the creator’s site except for those I took and those from the HealthHack promotional material.

Dr Nick Hamilton, find him on Twitter, Flickr & at UQ.

Sue Pillans, find her on Twitter and her at her website

Randall Austin, find him on Twitter

There’s lots more at Roisin McMahon’s Storify of the HealthHack Brisbane 2016 event to dig into if you are interested (aka you are interested; it’s very worth it).

HealthHack 2016 Sponsors - Thank you!

Of course none of this would have been possible without the sponsors. Thanks to all of them for making HealthHack happen. Please check them out via the links below.

Itoc, River City Labs, ThoughtWorks, RCC, BlueChilli, Canva, Queensland Government, UQ Institute for Molecular Bioscience, Amazon Web Services, QCIF, iLab at UQ, Data61, Open Knowledge, JetBrains, GitHub, YOW! Australia

Originally posted on Linkedin

The golden dentists @ Brisbane 2016

I went to the Brisbane 2016 event and saw a lot of interesting problems pitched there from a wide range of problem owners.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

After the pitches had finished we started the process of forming teams around the problem  owners. I worked with a few of the teams that night to help them better understand their problem. There wasn't any one team I could find that I thought really needed my help full time so I held off joining a team that night. The organisers encouraged me to come back on Saturday and even if I didn't end up joining a team, just keep doing what I had been doing that Friday night and going around and helping teams work on their problems, working in a mentor role.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

Come Saturday morning one of the problem owners from Friday night, Kenan, had not been able to secure anyone to work on his problem which was: Overtreatment and overcharging in the dental services market. He also raised the possibility of separating diagnosis and treatment services to encourage competition as a potential solution.
 

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

I sat down with Kenan and another person who had been unable to find a team Friday night, Randall, and we decided, after some initial conversations, to work on this problem. One of the volunteers, Gareth, overheard our discussions and was interested enough that he decided to join our team for the weekend as well. The problem Kenan had brought was quite large and didn't have an obvious solution to start work on. So we started working on better defining the problem and potential solutions.

We were very lucky to get some time on Saturday with one of Brisbane’s most experienced dentists, Dr Michael Foley. Dr Foley is a former president of the Queensland Dental Association. After talking through our initial ideas with him we significantly cut the scope of our initial plans.  we validated a core problem with him and we also got an idea for a solution. Dr Foley was little short of awesome and we really enjoyed the time he was able to spend with us. He has been an advocate for some time for fluoride in the water supply and has been instrumental in leading the charge against scare campaigns from anti-fluoride groups.   

We gathered all the information we had gotten from speaking with Dr Foley and then we set about defining our killer idea/problem really tightly and designing a solution that solved for it. Because of the time left and the type of solution we had chosen, we decided to build to the pitch rather than attempt to build a fully working solution. After discussing the different types of pitch we could do we ended up settling on a theory and design heavy pitch. However we decided to still do a basic prototype just to show the functionality of a working service.

Come Saturday night we were in full building mode.

We dummied up a dataset to use with the prototype, started designing a basic pageflow that would explain the functionality of the service we wanted to build, and we started the outline of our pitch and identifying the components we still needed.

dummy receipt dataset

mock up of receipt capture

We finalized what we were going to build in terms of functionality about Sunday lunch and that left us a few hours to get a first draft of our pitch out before pitch practice with the River City Labs pitch mentors who had volunteered their time to help out the teams.

It was really interesting seeing the different presentation styles of the River City Labs start-up guys vs an economics lecturer (Kenan). Even though there was quite a divide between how you would pitch for investors and our pitch at HealthHack we still got a lot out of the feedback from the River City Labs mentors and we used all of it to make the pitch much better.

Kenan delivered great pitch at the end. Our project didn't win anything at HealthHack, but that was hardly a disappointment considering how wonderful the projects that did win were.

image courtesy of Dr Sue Pillans

There were heaps of great solutions from this weekend. I fully expect a fair few of them to actually get up and into production in the near future. Some of them were pretty much ready to go into production at the end of the weekend.

Myself, Elliot Smith & Mark Promnitz won the Spirit of HealthHack awards.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

In the end, more than the prizes, we all just really enjoyed working on and learning about areas we knew very little about before coming to HealthHack.

I really enjoyed the challenge of working with a team of people I hadn’t worked with before and working with a problem owner from a field very different to my own experience. It was a good challenge to take the team from the initial problem pitch through to finding and validating the core problem we wanted to solve and then to formulating a solution that solved for it and delivered, what we thought was, value to both consumers and dentists alike.

One last piece of wisdom from our dentist friend, Dr Foley: “If you are getting a crown get gold, especially if it’s one of the back teeth that no can see. Not only is it the best material for a crown but it's also the cheapest.”

It was from this nugget of knowledge we got our team name: Golden Dentists. I have some other posts if you want to read more about the solution we pitched or the event itself.

Picture perfect

The pictures in this article came from a few sources.

Each picture has a link in it out to the creator’s site except for those I took and from the HealthHack promotional material.

Dr Nick Hamilton, find him on Twitter, Flickr & at UQ.

Sue Pillans, find her on Twitter and her at her website

There’s lots more at Roisin McMahon’s Storify of the HealthHack Brisbane 2016 event to dig into if you are interested (aka you are interested; it’s very worth it).

HealthHack 2016 Sponsors - Thank you!

None of this would have been possible without the sponsors. Thanks to all of them for making HealthHack happen. Please check them out via the links below.

Itoc, River City Labs, ThoughtWorks, RCC, BlueChilli, Canva, Queensland Government, UQ  Institute for Molecular Bioscience, Amazon Web Services, QCIF, iLab at UQ, Data61, Open Knowledge, JetBrains, GitHub, YOW! Australia

Originally posted on Linkedin

Karmen, a problem owner from Brisbane 2015

Hi there, my name is Karmen and I’m one of the organisers of the first HealthHack event in Canberra this year. But, my first encounter with HealthHack happened in Brisbane one year ago when I ended up participating as a problem owner, all thanks to Mitch Stanton-Cook…

At the time, I was a postdoc at the University of Queensland, working as a computational chemist on modelling membrane transport proteins. Many of these proteins are important drug targets and computational simulations provide a very detailed insights of the molecular motion and interactions with drugs. These simulations produce large files containing a lot of information and are computationally demanding to produce, but at the moment there is no repository that would support easy file sharing between researchers. So, I presented the idea of creating a repository for molecular dynamics simulation, named MDbox, at the HealthHack and was amazed by what can be achieved in such a short time!

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

This was primarily due to the small, but very awesome team that gathered around my idea, with most of the work carried out by Elliot Smith and Matthew Brown.

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

The entire concept of HealthHack was something very new to me; I enjoyed a different perspective to health problems and learned many new things over the course of the weekend, not to mention the enthusiasm of surrounding participants. Even better, our team won the second place!

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

But there’s more – just after the HealthHack in October last year, I moved to Canberra to take up another postdoc at ANU. Earlier this year, I successfully gained a grant from the ACT Innovation Development fund to develop my idea from HealthHack into a fully-fledged prototype. I have a lot to thank to HealthHack, which was definitely the first step in pursuing an idea that I had simmering for a long time. And look at me now – received funding to further develop my concept AND being a HealthHack organiser in Canberra!

Don’t miss your opportunity to make your ideas come true! Come and join us!

interview with Liz, a UX (User Experience) designer

How did you get involved in Health Hack? Did you come with a team?

I actually came to HealthHack completely on my own as it was only my second hackathon and I saw my colleague Steve Bennett was involved in one in another city. HealthHack was the first hackathon I’d seen coming up where there were defined project briefs posted before the hack began that already came with researched value propositions, meaning that working on a prototype solution could be the focus of the weekend. Although that didn’t quite go according to plan (does it ever?), the team grew organically and in the end there was an idea that played to all of our strengths that is still being worked on today. Since then I’ve gone on to do other hacks including Random Hacks of Kindness in Sydney, which has a similar model, and I really appreciate this approach (full disclosure: my brother is the assistant organizer).

What was your project about?

My project was glucohero. The concept of Glucohero is a website that draws on crowdsourced community reviews to drive relevant recommendations of mobile apps for patients suffering from Diabetes (primarily focussed on Type I right now). There is currently more than 300 different diabetes apps on the market, because diabetes is a condition with a very wide range of presenting features and each patient may be treated slightly differently depending both on the severity of their condition and the types of treatment that may be available or suitable for them. For example, some people have implanted insulin pumps which for some patients and their families are either too expensive or they have security concerns, but others might be looking for management that might involve finding appropriate recipes. Deciding which app is right for you is really hard to do.

What was the biggest challenge you faced?

Personally, it was giving the pitch at the end on very little sleep - but I think my team members (David and Vyoma) would agree it was changing concept almost halfway through the hack.

The project didn’t originally start as a “help me decide” service, it was a brief to make an app to take care of all of the needs for a Type I diabetes patient. Although it was understood from the outset that many apps had failed to meet the needs of the Product Owner’s nephew, it was clear that the main goals of a proposed app were the same of many apps already available. However, as there were no potential customers available for consultation at the time of the Hack, we trawled through online forums to find what patients were saying about these apps. It became very clear after a few threads on the sub Reddit for diabetes that many individuals had tried to develop apps to cover all of the needs of patients in a single design and appealed to forum members to tell them what patients needed. But this kind of one-size-fits-all approach seemed to be restrictive as many companies’ apps could do certain things better than others depending on patient needs, symptoms and equipment. Also, it seemed that patients were using multiple apps to circumvent other apps’ failings, including using those apps that aren’t specifically intended for diabetic patients.

We decided then that there was insufficient data on how this interaction occurs, and that designing a tool to collect data for this kind of situation is potentially more helpful and allows potential pivoting later. But this is one of the great things about participating in a hack -  there is great scope to come up with unexpected innovative interim solutions due to time pressure.

What was the best part of Health Hack?

The best part of HealthHack is easily it’s the people that come to a HealthHack. HealthHack attracts compassionate, honest, empathetic and genuinely lovely people who want to make real solutions to real problems where getting it wrong could also have real consequences. But getting a potential product right could potentially lead to a real difference in people’s lives and the participants are all happy to give up their weekends to do so. I only wish that I had more time to work on Glucohero with my Health Hack team :)

interview with maggie hardy

How did you get involved in Health Hack?

I connected with Mitch Stanton-Cook on Twitter, as they were looking for judges for the Brisbane node. I was impressed that Mitch mentioned they wanted to get a diverse range of mentors and judges to reflect the diversity of the participants, and he specifically mentioned gender equity as a goal for the Health Hack.

What was your role in Health Hack?

I was one of the three judges for the Brisbane node, along with Ginny Barbour (Executive Officer, Australiasian Open Access Support Group) and Colin McCririck (now CEO/CIO of eHealth Queensland).

image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton

What was the most interesting part of Health Hack for you?

Absolutely the ideas! The innovative ways participants worked collaboratively to solve some of medicine’s most difficult problems was striking. I was particularly impressed at the combination of low-tech and high-tech ideas that went into each project, and the supportive atmosphere for such a large group of people with a diverse set of skills and expertise.

What did you get out of Health Hack?

The Hack helped me to see my own research in a different light, and to consider new approaches and technologies to take my work to the next step. In addition to increasing my own professional network, I met some incredibly motivated and passionate people that I’m lucky to be working with now on the next year’s Health Hack.