Healthcare needs innovation and disruptive ideas, but where can you start and what is the best way?
The motto of the hackathon was “attempto”, which is also the slogan of the university of Tübingen and can be translated with “let‘s do it”. And that is what the participants of the innovate.healthcare hackathon showed at its best.
“Health Hackers” Challenge the Status Quo
The event started with a welcome session, where the hosts presented their real-world challenges from the field of life sciences. After the short pitches, the participants gathered in groups and chose the challenges they were most interested in. The teams were composed of great variety by motivated “health hackers” with backgrounds in medicine, biology, IT, business, healthcare management and many more. Soon they started to dig in their problems and came up with first possible ideas and solutions. The core of this hackathon was to find new and disruptive solutions for big problems in healthcare by challenging the status quo.
In the course of the next 48 hours, coaches joined the hackathon. They supported the teams to develop their ideas and to overcome obstacles. It was great to see how different possible solutions for the challenges could look like. Some were developing an app or a website, while others were building prototypes with a 3D printer or with the help of a tennis ball.
Award Ceremony and Prices
Everyone was excited for the final pitches and the expectations even were surpassed! Eight great teams presented their solutions to the jury and it was not easy for them to decide on the winners. In the end, the awards went to “Blindly”, a mobile navigation system for blind people (most patient benefit & audience award), to “LuxFlux” using polarized light for cell and tissue analysis (most innovative solution) and to “Medical Matchers”, who found a solution for a better matching of study participants for medical trials (best business case).
Nevertheless, all teams came up with amazing solutions and we are looking forward to hearing more from them in the future!
Here you can see some impressions
