Hack&Health App

Challenge

On the 25th and 26th of November of 2016 a Hackathon took place in the campus of the UPC in Terrassa. It was organized by the City Hall of Terrassa with the collaboration of Synergic Partners, a Big Data and Data Science consulting firm, part of the Telefónica group.

The aim of the Hackathon was to find a solution to improve the quality of life of the citizens. Several data was provided from hospitals from the city and applications that focus on health such as HealthApp.

Solution

The solution proposed by the MESIO group, formed by Ernest Benedito, Gonzalo Espinosa and Sandra Orozco was to develop an app which helped therapists that had patients with eating disorders. These kind of patients need to have a close follow-up, as they are prone to having critical episodes. Thus, with the data provided, they built an app that helped the therapist with the following tools:

1. A quick view of the patient’s performance in therms of eating frequency and activity recording.
2. A prediction with the percentage of probability of a patient to have an episode for a given day.

Further explanation about the predicting model and the app development can be found on the GitHub repository of the project.

Awards

The solution was awarded with the “Best Technical Solution Award”, the 1st prize of the Hackathon. The components of the group where rewarded with tickets to the Strata Conference held in London in May 2017.

Media

The competition was also covered by media. The following article was written by a local newspaper:

    Hack&Health rewards ideas that improve the quality of life

    A tool to predict episodes of eating disorders has been the winner of the first Hack&Health organized by the City Hall of Terrassa. Synergic Partners, consulting firm of Big Data and Data Science (part of the Telefónica group), has collaborated with the city council to celebrate this first Hack&Health, an initiative that wants to make entrepreneurs use all the resources of Big Data to create solutions that improve the quality of life of citizens.

    During two days, more than 80 people, between 15 and 60 years sought at the UPC, creative solutions in the field of health and create tools based on the use of Big Data in order to improve the quality of life of citizens. To this end, the assistants worked with a set of open data provided by the Terrassa City Hall and also participated in the different training workshops taught by Synergic Partners. After two days of work, the prize for the best technical solution was for the MESIO group formed by Gonzalo Espinosa, Sandra Orozco and Ernest Benedito. Based on data provided by Healthapp on eating disorders, the team focused on the value that this information can bring to doctors to detect and prevent future episodes. The prize for the idea with more business projection fell to the group formed by Juan Pablo López, Beatriz Martín, Helena Solar and Imanol Morata. The team, with a very high technical level, focused on predicting episodes that will occur in the one-day time period from the Healthapp data. In addition, based on the information provided, they created new variables to expand the field of analysis.

    Finally, honorable mention was given to the Salut Activa group, formed by Marta González, Celia García, Víctor Baños, Miquel Mussons and Javier Pescador, for the creation of a network that allows the interconnection of all community assets (medical organizations and institutions) with the aim of improving care and service to patients. The proposal, based on data from the Terrassa Sanitary Consortium, would also allow users to share information and doubts.