The team that took on a challenge from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) won first prize at HealthHack Brisbane 2015, held 23–25 October.
The team—which included data hackers from Halfbrick Studios, the Brisbane video game company that created Fruit Ninja—developed PainPal, a holistic pain management app involving diagnostic, management and information components. It aims to bring patients and their families, researchers and clinicians together to address problems.
The PainPal team also won a Spirit of HealthHack award alongside PhD student Anup Shah, from UQ's Diamantina Institute, for his work on cloud carpentry computing.
The event, which RCC co-sponsored, is a data hack weekend dedicated to solving medical research problems.
All of this year's HealthHack Brisbane winning challenges came from UQ.
Second prize went to MDBox, a database to store, share and visualise molecular dynamic simulation data. The project came from UQ’s Molecular Dynamics Group, School of Chemistry & Molecular Biosciences.
Third place was awarded to YuGene, a real-time graph simplification and scaling project from UQ’s Stemformatics Group in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN).
The event had a full house of 80 participants, with RCC staff Dr Nick Hamilton and Belinda Weaver helping as mentors.
The judges were Dr Maggie Hardy, a UQ post-doctoral research fellow at IMB; Colin McCririck, Queensland Health's Chief Technology Officer; and Dr Ginny Barbour, Executive Officer, Australasian Open Access Support Group.
Former Queensland Chief Scientist Prof Peter Andrews (pictured below, standing) opened the event on Friday night, 23 October.
