Launching our Hackathon Ideas — Part 1
The 5th Digital Health hackathon was held on 1–2 December 2020. The ideas that were pitched after a 48-hour of hard work are further developed as part of the Digital Health MSc program. Through the spring semester, we will get the opportunity to work with our team members and utilize these ideas for a semester project. Aside from presenting our progression through three major checkpoints, we will be given guidance and advice from different lecturers. Varied educational modules taught during our second semester will empower us with relevant knowledge to execute our ideas and create an actual product.
In the first post of the “Launching our Hackathon Ideas” series, I will be sharing my own experiences as part of my involvement as a team leader to reach our first checkpoint in the semester project.
Preparation for the semester project started as soon as the hackathon ended.
While I was still reeling from the excitement but grueling 48-hours (with minimal sleep hours), thoughts about progressing and continuity of my hackathon idea STROL, was always at the back of my mind. STROL stems from the problem that working adults were getting more sedentary, leading to higher incidences of musculoskeletal conditions and other chronic illnesses like diabetes and coronary heart disease to name a few. Incorporating gamification concepts and incentives, it was marketed towards employers to motivate their employees, increasing their physical activities to the recommended levels outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO). Despite not winning any incubator awards or prizes, the opportunity to continue with STROL was presented in the form of our semester project through the spring semester.
Unfortunately, STROL did not progress beyond the hackathon phase. One of the feedback given was that gamification concept did not resonate well with employers. Another possibility that halted STROL’s progression was that more than half of the original team members did not continue with the semester project.
Persevere in your ideals and strongly believe it in! Also allow yourself to be open and see things from a different perspective.
However, the effort and valuable feedback given during the hackathon did not all go down in vain. Motivation in the creation of STROL stems from improving physical well-being and promoting physical activities. It originates from my work experience as a physiotherapist. However, combating sedentary behavior is not as simple as a walk in the park. Similar to many existing complex healthcare problems, the cause of undesirable behavioral pattern is multi-factorial and there are no magic bullets to address these issues. In recent years, using gamification concepts to modify behavior have gained traction with concept like ‘serious games’ but outcomes were generally mixed.
As much as I wished STROL can be a success, an opportunity to settle my thoughts down and a long conversation with a close classmate sparked a perspective change inside me. On hindsight, I figured I missed the point that concepts of gamification will likely garner more interest in adolescents instead of a business-to-business product targeted at employers. Following this lead, I discovered the problem of inadequate physical activities also exists in adolescents; it contributes to another emerging problem with urbanization — childhood obesity. Upon further reading, I slowly realized sedentary behavior was not the most significant contributing factor. Rather, improper nutrition in adolescents is shown to have a higher impact in rising trends of childhood obesity in urban countries.
Pivoting away from the original idea may initially sound like an uphill task, but it gets better when everyone finds the momentum to start again together.
Together with my new teammates, Katriin and Carmen, we decided to take the plunge to pivot our semester project from STROL. We were leaning towards creating a digital health solution targeting at factors that result in improper nutrition in adolescents. Initially, I was concerned as our team did not have a nutrition expert and a shorter deadline due to the late pivot (little did we know, other teams also had pivoted away from their original idea). Despite that, all of us were motivated to work on this idea together. Within a span of a few weekly meetings, we managed to uncover many shortcomings regarding present solutions to combat childhood obesity.
Further discussions, we came up with NOSI, which is the name of our new digital health solution and team. Our mission is to intervene early in childhood obesity, by providing a virtual healthy cookbook for children and increasing parents’ involvement towards their child’s nutrition with the help of digital tools. We hope that with the use of NOSI, we will be able to influence a generation of children to be conscious about food and eat healthily.
A well-thought problem and a targeted solution will garner good feedback from potential end-users.
NOSI did not appear out of the blue. It was a committed team effort to brainstorm and delve deeper to uncover the root cause of childhood obesity. We also interviewed and administered informal surveys to gauge the interest level of our potential end-users. One of the insights that we unexpectedly discovered was that children in Estonia were cooking much younger than we had expected. This meant that our targeted age group for our end-users would be lower than initially proposed. Other insights came from interviews from parents, where they were excited at the idea of getting their children to cook and potentially help foster a healthier diet and independence. An opportunistic interview with a clinical nutritionist, who also happened to be our classmate, revealed that parental involvement is crucial in overcoming childhood obesity.
These initial interviews gave us a good justification for our newly minted idea and presentation during our first checkpoint. It helped us to answer various hypothesis which we could only get from our potential end-users. In addition, we also took away many pointers from different lecturers who have deep experience in children’s welfare, IT architecture and formation of a start-up during the first checkpoint of the semester project. Overall, I was surprisingly pleased at how much NOSI has progressed, but definitely more work needs to be done before an actual product could be launched.
Eliis, also a student from MSc Digital Health, who participated in the Digital Health hackathon and is part of team “Bloom Your Mind”, is going to share her experience on the development of her team’s idea after the hackathon and their progression to the first checkpoint.
When we started with the hackathon, none of us could fathom how much we can learn in 48 hours. Despite multiple turns of events, viewing our idea at different angles and having distinct thoughts, one thing that I am sure is that our team works well together and in harmony. Be it productivity, sense of humor and being respectful towards each other, we have it all covered; good food and glasses of good wine included when needed.
The first point that I learned through the process of reaching the first checkpoint of our semester project is the creation and description of our user persona. Our initial motivation was to help make the world a better place for everyone, unfortunately it does not work in that manner. There will be instances where our focus changes multiple times, but I assure it will be fine. In fact, the reiteration of our user persona has changed three times from the hackathon to our first checkpoint and we are still optimistic and thrilled with our progress.
At the end of the first checkpoint, it is also crucial to align the team’s main goal and strategy. To achieve that, one trick is to keep your mind open to any fresh and new ideas. As quoted from one of my teammates, ‘keep your head in the clouds and feet on the ground’. This is especially at the initial stage of your idea. Even though some thoughts may seem unrealistic, try to keep them at the back of your head. You never know what might develop from them if you dismiss them immediately. Write these ‘cloud ideas’ down somewhere and review them from time to time, sometimes it may unexpectedly give you inspiration. Another benefit is that it encourages everybody to be open in sharing their ideas within the team as well.
Last but not least, SPEAK WITH EVERYBODY. I strongly emphasized that! Speak to your friends and family members. Try to reach out as much as you can and engage in conversations with many specialists to make yourself the content expert. Look at things from different angles and generate more ideas from these conversations as much as possible. Do not be afraid to approach a distant friend or a complete stranger. It might be the case where half of them will not reply, but the wider you cast your network the possibilities of getting the most crucial contact or information is higher.
It has been a crazy learning experience in the field of Digital Health so far. Together with the people we meet and the terrific teamwork that we have, Team “Bloom Your Mind” can’t wait for what is yet to come!
Do look out for the next post in the “Launching our Hackathon Ideas” series after we have reached our next checkpoints!
