RCC is sponsoring a national hackathon involving teams working together online to solve important healthcare and medical research problems.
RCC is a long-time sponsor of HealthHack. This year’s hackathon started on Friday, 24 July and will be held online over two weekends, ending on Sunday, 2 August.
HealthHack is bringing researchers, students and healthcare professionals together with software developers, educators, engineers, designers and other scientists to create innovative solutions for seven research problems.
The research problems mostly involve app’ solutions or machine learning for diseases and disabilities. The required tasks during the hackathon to solve the seven problems include:
- improving contact tracing and data privacy for COVID-19 in developing countries
- creating vision impaired-friendly medical forms
- creating a digital support system to help young adults manage their experience of inflammatory bowel disease
- creating an Auslan (Australian sign language) community data portal
- creating a machine learning-based software tool for high-resolution protein structures to speed up discovery time for biomedical researchers
- creating a platform to help capture, curate and share stories and data about racism
- creating a solution to improve scientific literacy amongst the general public.
RCC eResearch Analyst Dr Nick Hamilton is once again a ‘Problem Wrangler’ for HealthHack, i.e. in charge of coordinating the problems to be solved.
“Machine learning, privacy, and open shared community resources for health and research feature strongly at this year’s HealthHack,” said Dr Nick.
“We have had over 300 people sign up to attend, making this our biggest year ever.
“HealthHack has now been running every year since 2015 [largely in Brisbane], and many projects that have been seeded at HealthHack have gone on to either win an award, get substantial further investment or have formed the basis of grant applications.”
The researchers and professionals behind this year’s problems pitched their projects live virtually on the opening weekend to software developers, designers and other problem solvers. Teams of hackers then formed to work on the projects.
This year’s HealthHack is being held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic and is using Remo’s virtual conference software.
