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Hoos Health Hack provides student thinkers chance to shine

Weekend event seeks to connect students, patients, scientists and entrepreneurs

From Oct. 10 to 12, patients, doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs from across the region will

come together to address medicine and health care challenges during Hoos Health Hack, Charlottesville’s second annual medical hackathon.

The hackathon, hosted by Health UnBound, encourages Engineering School students to make use of interdisciplinary collaboration to create applications, prototypes, 3D models or social projects.

Fourth-year Engineering student Dasha Tyshlek, director of Health UnBound, said the event

begins with networking and idea sessions in which participants brainstorm, pitching problems they want to address before forming teams to tackle them.

Doctors, entrepreneurs and IT professionals advise teams during pre-pitch periods. The event

will also feature multiple guest speakers to help stimulate pitch sessions, including David Touve, director of Galant Center for Entrepreneurship, and Mark Hanson, co-founder of BeClose.

“We’re adding a few workshops so [participants] can learn prototyping on the fly,” Tyshlek said.

During pitch sessions, participants share ideas and network with people from other disciplines to design solutions in response to unmet medical needs.

“We present a board full of suboptimal problems, then [participants] grab a few sticky notes and start finding solutions to those problems,” Tyshlek said.

Tyshlek said experience with the design side of medicine is of great value to future doctors and nurses, allowing them to make more informed choices about what medical equipment to buy and which products to test.

“It’s an amazing learning experience for just one weekend,” Tyshlek said, adding that participants may further develop prototypes and compete in the University’s upcoming Entrepreneurship Cup.

Hackathon teams present their prototypes and solution demos to a panel of judges and compete for monetary prizes. The panel evaluates whether the problem they pitch is a good problem, how well participants follow through with their prototypes and how well they build their cases.

“One team found a way to register people in homes, so that in case of emergency a sticker on the door could provide EMTs with additional information about who’s in the house,” Tyshlek said.

Other ideas included a portable staircase for physical therapy and a device to monitor muscles and detect when epileptic patients have seizures.

Some projects aim to delve into the social and psychological dimensions of perplexing health care problems.

“One sponsor wants to address the compliance of type 1 diabetic patients who are teenage girls," Tyshlek said. "Because insulin makes them gain weight, they don’t want to take it.”

Well-designed solutions may receive financial support from Health UnBound.

“Our organization is looking for hardworking students who can come up with interesting projects," Tyshlek said. "We can help place them in start-ups and provide up to half the stipend.”

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