The Innovation Studio at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), today announced10 semi-finalists from the first ever Gamifying Pediatrics Hackathon, which took place April 12-14, 2019 at BCG Digital Ventures (BCGDV) in Manhattan Beach (CA), the global corporate venture and incubation arm of the Boston Consulting Group. This hackathon brought together 185 enthusiastic participants, including physicians and nurses on the front lines of pediatric medicine, engineers, developers, and experts in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and gaming.
Gamifying Pediatrics Hackathon Background
The Hackathon’s aim is to encourage development, incubation, and implementation of new digital health tools and immersive experiences that will serve the needs of both patients and providers in the pediatric healthcare space. Over the course of 48 hours, Hackathon participants pitched 47 ideas and formed 22 teams which created rough prototypes, presenting their ideas to a judging panel of CHLA experts on the final day.
“Curated collisions are the secret of effective innovation. Our hackathon surrounded smart, passionate developers with clinical leaders, tech industry experts, and healthcare executives, allowing for random interactions that enabled the creation of incredible innovative solutions,” says Omkar Kulkarni, Chief Innovation Officer of the CHLA Innovation Studio, whose recently formed Digital Health Lab is addressing three areas within pediatric healthcare:
1. Enhancing digital therapeutic care for patients
2. Improving clinical education and training for doctors, nurses and patient families
3. Transforming the patient and family experience so that the clinical setting is more appealing and less frightening for young patients.
In addition to BCGDV, CHLA Innovation Studio recruited a rich set of players in digital health to sponsor the Gamifying Pediatrics Hackathon including MIT Hacking Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital’s Hacking Pediatrics and other Los Angeles technology companies.
Prizes & Awards
Ten teams were selected as semi-finalists who will advance to the Incubator phase, where they receive free mentorship while developing their prototypes over the next six months. Each will present at CHLA Demo Day, a final competition, in October. The ten teams include: Pb Buddies; Positive Place; Team BiBli; Global Smiles; CODE: BLUE; Children’s Hospital Companion / StoryHealers; Poo-Pee Interactive; Speak iT; Team Virtual Real Heart; and Mila, which also received Digital Ventures Audience Choice award, a recognition which includes a $1,000 prize and advisory services from BCG Digital Ventures.
At CHLA Demo Day, up to three teams will be chosen as finalists, each receiving up to $15,000 in seed grants, plus the opportunity to pilot their products at CHLA. In addition, the finalists will receive the opportunity to have their product introduced at HLTH 2019 conference taking place in October in Las Vegas.
List of 10 Semi-Finalists
Here is a look at the 10 semi-finalists from the first ever Gamifying Pediatrics Hackathon:
Pb buddies gamifies diabetes education through a virtual reality education session for kids with diabetes to better understand so their condition and to teach them healthy eating habits that will improve their diabetes management.
Positive Place creates a magical virtual garden experience for patients to explore with personalized flowers and notes written by friends and family. Using a virtual reality headset, patients explore virtual gardens, watching flowers bloom with messages of love and support from family and friends.
Team BiBli is a voice-enabled and artificial intelligence powered therapy robot that aims to provide cost-effective care at home.
Global Smiles will create a partnership between GIBLIB, Operation Smile, and CHLA to leverage high quality video production and distribution to improve medical education and surgical training for medical teams across the world, first focusing on cleft palate surgery and then expanding to other procedures.
CODE:BLUE is a virtual reality simulation tool, designed in partnership with emergency department providers, to enhance communication skills for multi-disciplinary clinical teams in urgent and stressful situations.
Children’s Hospital Companion / StoryHealers (2 teams joined forces to become one): Children’s Hospital Companion is an augmented reality chatbot and patient experience application that engages the patient and family before, during and after their hospital visit to prepare for their hospital experience and improve the navigation of a patient’s journey at CHLA; StoryHealers uses an augmented reality game and portal for kids to encourage post-surgery mobility and movement in order to improve recovery, patient outcomes and reduce length of stay.
Poo-Pee Interactive is an in-home biofeedback game that educates and helps children learn how to control their pelvic floor and bladder to develop healthy behaviors.
Speak-iT is a voice-activated speech therapy game that aims to improve the effectiveness of speech therapy by improving patient engagement and making speech therapy fun. It was designed with CHLA speech therapists and built by a 14 year old during the hackathon!
Virtual Real Heart is a virtual reality application that uses MRI data to create a virtual view of a patient’s heart that surgeons can use to better explore their patient’s heart to more deeply understand and visualize their condition, teach other providers, and plan for surgeries.
Mila is a music-based game for kids that uses neurologic music therapy techniques and cognitive gaming science, to create a game that can remotely identify and train cognitive skills using computer vision and audio feedback for activities like singing and dancing.