HackHarvard
Althea Team Members (left to right): Samantha Adams, Kaito Sekiya, Ashley Etheridge, and Alen Ganopolsky (photo provided by Harvard University)
The ninth annual HackHarvard competition occurred on October 11-13 at Harvard University. Over 500 students from 133 universities and 27 countries participated in the competition. Three teams tied for the Patient Safety Technology Challenge prize awards: Althea, CognitiveKeyboard, and SimplySign. The winners received Hatch Restore 2 Alarm Clocks.
Althea team members include Samantha Adams, Kaito Sekiya, Alen Ganopolsky, and Ashley Etheridge. Althea is an app that enables users to track their medications with a daily checklist, along with symptom tracking and cross-referencing medication side effects with symptoms a user experienced and entered into the app. After a user checks a medication they took from their daily checklist, the app prompts them to report any symptoms, “which the server evaluates as potential side effects of their prescribed medications.” It then cross-references FDA data and proposes a “suggested severity” for a side effect. Samantha Adams, one of the Althea team members, noted that “a user is still able to adjust their severity label if they think their symptom is better or worse than the suggested/typical severity.” She also pointed out the app’s logging system, which allows users to see trends in their symptoms and share such data with their doctors.
Kaito Sekiya, another Althea team member, drew inspiration to create a patient safety focused tech solution from his personal medical history, including two life-threatening situations that could have been avoided with a correct diagnosis and medication. He said he wanted to “build a solution that not only ensures taking medication on time but could also potentially save lives.” Another consideration included accessibility. Sekiya said his team understood the fact that many older adults often have little-to-no tech experience, so they “designed very simple and intuitive UI/UX and made [the] registration process optional for mobile users.” The team plans to connect the web and mobile apps into a single ecosystem, as well as adding a scanning feature to simplify adding prescriptions into the system.
CognitiveKeyboard team members include Shaurya Singh, Maggie Nardini, Andrew Liu, and Taha Biyikli. CognitiveKeyboard is an Android keyboard that tracks user typing patterns and uses keystroke data and researcher feedback to predict risks of cognitive decline and mental health conditions. The team “considered the technologies people use daily and landed on typing, something everyone does across devices—whether sending texts, searching online, or writing documents.” The innovation tracks backspaces, special characters, typing speed, and pauses between keystrokes without storing text, thereby eliminating privacy concerns about the content of text. The team’s next steps surround iOS implementation, supporting browser and desktop statistical analysis, detecting users at urgent risk, and developing an interface for healthcare providers.
Sydney Stokes, a Junior at Boston University studying Computer Science, created SimplySign, which uses a machine learning model to analyze hand gestures and then translates American Sign Language (ASL) to English text that is displayed on the screen. She was inspired by a friend’s hospitalization when she was studying abroad, which she described as “frustrating, painful, and scary…trying to make herself understood” and express her concerns to her doctors who spoke a different language. Stokes said, “after hearing about how this affected the medical care she received, leaving her unable to advocate for herself or take charge of her own medical care as everyone should, I realized there had to be something I could do to help reduce language barriers in healthcare.” She wanted to create a solution that would “provide real-time assistance, reducing the isolation and confusion patients feel when they can’t communicate their needs. This project is about creating accessibility for all and ensuring that no one is left without a voice, regardless of the situation.” Stokes plans to add other sign languages, aside from ASL, to SimplySign.
