Hacking Health : Re imagining the possibilities of Intergenerational housing
This weekend, Hamilton, Ontario hosted a Hackathon to help innovate the process of aging in areas such as mobility, nutrition and exercise. Contestants were also welcome to pitch other ideas. Lets jump , into my first hackathon experience in Canada. Let’s go fam!
Day 1
The first day was more or less a networking event. You meet and greet with the other teams who were pitching their ideas and if interested you can join their teams or vice versa. My team went ahead and pitched the idea to combat loneliness and depression among seniors by matching young and older generation through the basis of an app. It was a 60 second pitch. A total of 23 ideas were pitched ranging from IOT ones to building Block chain for data privacy for EMRs. Once the pitches were done, interested parties could join teams they wanted to contribute to. I had another student and then another joined. So we became a team of three. All excited as to how best to revamp process of aging. I was especially interested in taking a Human centered approach and as such noted in my “ Skills / people wanted “ column as all stakeholders in the healthcare industry.
23 ideas. 22 teams to beat.
Day 2
The second day kicked off with my team trying to refine my problem further. Basically we wanted to connect the younger generation to the elderly via an app in exchange for affordable/free housing for the youth whereas the elderly get companionship. However by midday after networking and chatting with mentors and other stakeholders we sensed this posed a huge number of challenges. For one:
Retirement homes do not have much occupancy left.
The number of elderly above 65+ is set to rise and this further puts strains on housing.
There is a complex relationship between PSWs, Nursing homes, Retirement homes, Govt. funding and our model did not exactly address those issues.
By afternoon it was back to our sticky notes and notebooks. Again, not a very encouraging sight to see your competitors using X code and android studio to develop and code their ideas. Everyone else seemed to be working on their prototypes with one group 3d printing their hardware while we still were struggling to define our problem. It would have been more discouraging but Einstein had my back.
“ If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions “
— Albert Einstein
We narrowed down on an idea that seemed feasible but not attractive in terms of Technology . But hey as long as the problem is being solved. Our team came with a service based app that would help connect University Co-op students to prospective retirement homes for volunteering as part of their credit courses. This in turn would help the youth connect and bond with the elderly while facilitating a powerful exchange of ideas. The senior would play the role of a possible mentor in helping develop the university undergrads. We then would take out service idea and market to universities where they will pay us a Co-op program fee in exchange for us to connect students to volunteer at the retirement homes. It wasn’t our original idea but we decided to reach our end goal by making this our Phase 1 in product implementation with Phase 3 being our goal of inter generational society. Based on this we came up with some mock ups as to how our service would look if on an mobile device.
Day 3
The third day began at a slower pace compared to the second day. All the teams were busy preparing their presentation slides to present in front of the judges. Our team just tweaked and prepared the script as to what we would say while eating the food provided by the good folks at the hackathon. We used keynote on Mac ( Great stuff ! Never used it before !) to make ours.
Our Problem we wanted to solve : Loneliness and depression among senior citizens. We suggested inter generational housing with the students staying in for free in exchange for care companionship and comfort. This would facilitate a two way relationship where the seniors would have company and also possibly learn technology such as using internet, Facebook, stay in touch with their friends while the youth would have stay and food taken care of and also have an older mentor figure.
In the end, We did not win anything. There were pretty good pitches by other teams. A team pitched the idea about available beds in Long term Care (LTCs) and they won first place. We networked and met with some great people. The VP of Marketing of a certain Govt institute was interested. Other aspiring startups liked the our planning of how we propose to go towards inter generational housing but start with Co-op Volunteering services. Overall it wasn't much about winning as much it was about learning and meeting extremely smart talented interested in hacking health.
