In just 48 hours at last year’s Health Hack Brisbane event, a prototype app for tracking Motor Neuron Disease patient symptoms was made. The “Show Me MND” prototype helped to secure $770,000 in NHMRC Partnership funding, which includes plans to build upon and roll out the app nationally.
“Show Me MND”, based on a Motor Neuron Disease patient-centred data collection, gained second prize in last year’s Health Hack. First prize went to “Yarning”, which uses storytelling to help provide culturally-sensitive end-of-life care for Indigenous Australians.
Yarning is currently being developed further and will be rolled out to various Indigenous groups. Bioinformatician and software developer Thom Cuddihy led development on the project.
Since Health Hack Brisbane began in 2013, many projects seeded at the data hackathon have either gone on to receive substantial further investment, or have formed the basis of grant applications.
MD Box, a repository for molecular dynamic simulations formed at Health Hack Brisbane 2015, led by Dr Karmen Condic-Jurkic from UQ’s Molecular Dynamics Group, went on to receive $100,000 in funding from the CBR Innovation Development Fund to develop the idea into a fully-fledged prototype.
This year’s Health Hack Brisbane, which RCC is co-sponsoring, is scheduled to take place over the weekend of 14–16 September.
The data hack event will bring researchers, students and healthcare professionals together with software developers, educators, engineers, designers and scientists to create innovative solutions to important healthcare and medical research problems.
Participation is free, whether you bring a research problem to the table as a researcher, or donate your skills to the hack as a software developer, user experience (UX) designer, data analyst or visualiser. Volunteer helpers are also being sought.
RCC eResearch Analyst Dr Nick Hamilton will once again be lead "Problem Wrangler" for Health Hack, i.e. in charge of coordinating the problems to be solved.
"Health Hack is unique in the world of ‘hackathons’ in that it focuses on solving real-world problems brought to the hack by health professionals and researchers who need a solution. As such, many of the outcomes have been further developed well beyond Health Hack. Health Hack is a great way to network and build connections across health, IT, government and universities," said Dr Nick.
“This year we have Problem Wranglers across several institutions, with myself at UQ, Amanda Miotto (Griffith), Alan Robertson (TRI and QUT) and Roisin McMahon (Griffith), and we would expect to draw Problem Owners from all of these institutions and more widely.”
See the Health Hack website for further information and to sign up as a participant. Check out photos from last year’s Brisbane Health Hack.
Any queries, please contact Dr Nick (n.hamilton@imb.uq.edu.au).
