On February 22-24, 2013 UBC Department of Physical Therapy members had the opportunity to collaborate with software designers and developers in a ‘hackathon’. Hacking Health is a 48-hour event to bring together health care professionals and ‘hackers’ (designers, developers, programmers, business managers, and industry) to try to use technology to solve important health care problems.
Faculty member, Dr. Pat Camp, and her MSc student, Christen Chan pitched the idea of a smartphone application for pulmonary rehabilitation which attracted the interest of developers and designers. With only about 1% of people with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) receiving rehabilitation, a way to monitor and ensure safe exercise in patients remotely will be very significant. More importantly, increasing exercise in COPD patients has been shown to decrease mortality rates.
Christen, developer Evgeny Vinnik, and designer Jenn Kong worked all day on Saturday and Sunday to develop a prototype application that incorporated patient-reported outcomes, monitoring of heart rate and oxygen saturation, and safe transmission of data.
Christen and Evgeny presented the prototype on the last day. There was a great deal of enthusiasm for the application and the project team was awarded the Microsoft Award which includes ongoing technical support from Microsoft, and the Best Allied-Health Project.
Knowledge Broker, Alison Hoens’ team turned the Tendinopathy Toolkit into an interactive webpage and a web app! This was accomplished via the combined vision and skills of Kat Cortes (web designer), Craig Slagel (web developer), Dr Alex Scott (UBC Assistant Professor), Dr. Ron Joe (MD) and Dr Tony Otto (MD). The team had so much fun working with each other that they committed to continue their work together to refine these tools.
Left to Right: Kat Cortes, Craig Slagel, Alison Hoens, Dr. Tony Otto, Dr. Ron Joe (dog-Dynasty)
If you are interested in learning more about Hacking Health and/or have any ideas for potential projects for next year contact Alison at Alison.hoens@ubc.ca
Stay tuned for further developments on both these exciting projects…