The first hackathon to focus on health education technologies, INNOVATE2EDUCATE, was held this past Thursday and Friday in Beer-Sheva. Major companies, the health funds, the IDF, BGU faculty, students and more participated in the first ever Israeli health education technologies hackathon to be held at JVP’s CyberLabs in the Gav-Yam Negev Advanced Technologies Park for 29 consecutive hours. The opening and closing events were held at the offices of the Center for Digital Information at the ATP.
The event was an initiative of BGU's Faculty of Health Sciences, the Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation in the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Tech 7 and the Excellence Branch of the Pedagogy Administration at the Ministry of Education.
The idea arose at the Faculty of Health Sciences, where the faculty was looking for a way to improve teaching methods. The event marks the beginning of a process of updating and improving teaching methods for the 21st Century. The goal is to shift from teacher-based teaching to student self-learning, which has been shown to be more effective.
Faculty of Health Sciences Dean Prof. Amos Katz, “Teaching and training methods in the field of health sciences must be updated to correspond to today’s reality. After many years of conservative teaching using existing methods we are committed to moving away from frontal teaching, which is based on old methods of knowledge transfer, to teaching that challenges the students to learn, think for themselves, be creative and promotes understanding, synthesis of data, finding solutions to problems and implementing them.”
Prof. Dafna Schwartz, director of the Bengis Center, “Events of these types, which connect people from different worlds, enables the formation of diverse groups which together could come up with an innovative initiative that could change educational processes.”
3D Anatomy took first place with a platform for teaching through three dimensional displays or 3D printed objects that can be easily integrated into the syllabus. Lecturers can “pin” questions on models to test students and students can use the model to prepare for the test. The system is compatible with current technologies. The team took home NIS 3,000 for first place. The prizes were sponsored by Wix.
Sim 360 phone and MEDETECT tied for second. Sim 360 phone is a system in which anyone can photograph ongoing procedures from multiple angles and add in comments. For example, paramedics practicing resuscitation techniques were, until now, confined to specific rooms that were equipped with expensive cameras to photograph their technique. The Sim 360 phone transforms the smartphone into a mobile camera which can capture the scene from various angles, even in a moving ambulance.
MEDETECT is a monitoring system for patients in internal medicine wards which warns the medical staff of deterioration in the patients’ condition and offers treatment advice.
The teams in second place took home a cash prize of NIS 2,000.
Coming in third, MedQ wants to bridge the language gap between patient and doctor. It is an application for tablets that enables the doctor to assemble and then ask a series of questions in the patient’s own language and then arrange the answers in the manner best suited to conveying the information to the medical team.
An application called Find the Gap received an honorable mention. Find the Gap helps teach about healthcare inequality by enabling classes to go outside the classroom to map and discuss where those inequalities exist.
Two other projects reached the final round. VIRTIPE is a virtual environment that enables logistical coordination for situations where patients require care from multiple departments. The data is saved for future analysis to enable improvement. MONOPROF warns a professor when he or she is becoming monotone and suggests asking a question or throwing a funny picture up on the screen. The system tracks the frequency of monotone lecturing for future analysis.
The hackathon brought together many different companies and organizations such as: EMC, WeWork and more. Soldiers from the IDF’s Medical Corps participated as did officials from the four health funds. GDG (Google’s developers’ group in the South) and Starter, among others, took an active part in promoting the event.
See the photograph album from the event on our Facebook page
