Recap from the UC Health Hack

Jamf was thrilled to be a part of this year’s UC Health Hack from March 4 – 5 at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Hosted by UC San Diego Health and UCSD’s Engineering World Health (EWH), an undergraduate student-led organization, the hackathon brought together 300 students, engineers, physicians, software developers and field experts to develop innovative and impactful solutions around important healthcare issues.

“I was humbled to see what the students participating in the hackathon produced in such a short time. I can see many of the projects becoming real solutions,” said James Felton, a software engineer at Jamf, who helped judge projects at the event.

Throughout the hackathon, Jamf employees provided mentorship to contestants via a problem-solving workshop. Felton explained saying, “We pointed to resources to help contestants get started using a Raspberry Pi, which was available free to the contestants during the Hackathon. My colleague, Brad Becker, and I also judged several projects. The projects ranged from quantitatively measuring severity of dementia to cost effective noise cancelling headphones that specifically targeted repeated sound patterns produced by hospital equipment. Overall, the variety of the solutions and the range of problems they addressed was impressive and broad.”

During the event, teams up to five members worked to solve critical medical problems. The projects were presented to judges at a project expo, with top teams moving on to the final presentation. Each team’s idea was judged on four criteria: creativity and prototyping; research and design feasibility; implementation viability; and patient impact and presentation.

A project that creates a space for innovation and solution-finding in refugee settings, called “Blueprints for Life,” won first place on the global track. First place in the integrative health systems track went to the project “Incentivizing Patient Mobility Through Augmented Reality Art Therapy.” One of the project’s team members, Siddhant Ambulkar, said they were inspired by the work at Jacobs Medical Center.

“[The Jacobs Medical Center] is unique because each patient is given an iPad to use during their stay…[which] is primarily used for in-room comfort, such as adjusting the lights and temperature, and streaming movies to their TV,” Ambulkar explained.

Congratulations to all of the winners! Jamf looks forward to seeing how their hard work and innovative ideas will transform healthcare and help better the lives of the people around the globe in the years to come.