Being one of the coaches at the largest Healthcare Hackathon in Europe

I want just to give you a brief personal impression about 1 ½ days of my last week as a Developer Advocate at IBM.

Being one the of coaches at the largest Healthcare Hackathon in Europe was incredible.

The Hack was supported by the University Hospital of Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH), Merck , the Kieler Nachrichten and IBM .

Around 150 hackers worked for two days in 25 international teams including students, companies and startups.  More numbers you can find on the official webpage Healthcare Hackathon in Europe .

For me:

We as humans, health is our most important asset, at the Healthcare Hackathon it was brought to the foreground again with the help of technology and new ideas.

Here I want just to highlight some ideas, I was personally impressed.
I put my free interpretation for each of these challenges under each bullet point of the challenges.
Note: Some of the linked information is in german.

• donate blood 
  “Don’t be lazy and donate blood, hopefully you will never need blood to survive.”
• saving lives by bringing early resuscitation to cardiac arrest patient 
  “Help to avoid the death after 10 min.”

• happy-hospital
  “Don’t be worry, be happy” or “an happy patent is getting faster healthy than others”

The winner was: Hospimotion-and-Hospitainment-VR 
“Getting better by playing your physiotherapy game in “VR”.”

So, it was great to see and feel the passion of each hacker, who want to create an impact with his ideas and realization approaches on health.

As a Developer Advocate I did support an enablement web-session before the hackathon and a interactive live F2F workshop on Tuesday, related to the IBM Cloud development usage.

We need more coder/developer to realize such huge amount on valuable ideas, is a common observation in hackathons. The reason why some ideas weren’t realized, because of the missing developers.

 

 

During the hack it felt good to provide additional value as a coach for the hackers. I helped them in situations; How to use the IBM Cloud services or I provided ideas to choose the right service to their challenge/idea.
Different IBM Cloud Services were used by the different challenges. For example from starting in the AI area with  Watson Assistant, Watsons Studio to the Mobile area with Push Notifications and in runtimes area using the Cloud Foundry Apps and many other services in IBM Cloud.

 

The meal tasted very good, no limit on coffee and very important: The fun was given in the teams and at the hack. The Hackers were able to get a professional physio massage to stay fit during the whole hack.

 

In total: Great topic, professional organized, perfect teaming and fun. This is an experience I don’t want to miss and I hope more good ideas will realized in the future, to safe lifes and provide better health.

By the way: This leads me directly to the topic of call for code .  You as a Developer should be aware of!

Call for Code is a project which is targeting solutions for disaster preparedness and relief, which is supported by IBM, The Linux Foundation, UN Human Rights, and American Red Cross.

So, lets see which idea will win here!

I hope you enjoined my short overview of my 1 1/2 days last week!

Greetings,

Thomas

PS: By the way, you can use the IBM Cloud for free, if you simply create an IBM Lite account. Here you only need an e-mail address.

#Healthhackkiel #CallForCode