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Salud – Nordic Health Hackathon

Salud enables humans to track, interpret and manage their personal health. It tackles two main issues: one that Europeans do not make use of their free preventive check-ups and two, eventhough people in the Nordics are health-aware and track their heatlh, they self-diagnose incorrectly.

The Challenge: 

The aim of the Nordic Health Hackathon 2019 Reykjavik was to engage people living in the Nordics to improve health and quality of life for Nordic citizens by creating a healthy supportive environment based on innovative patient facing digital solutions. 

My Role(s):

– Facilitation of ideation sessions and brainstorming the solution

– UI design in Sketch

– Front-end development to ensure final Android app 

– Helping crafting Pitch storyline 

Tools & Methods Used:

– Brainstorming, ideation 

– Sketch for mockup and UI design 

– Super Nova Studio

– Flutter

– GitHub

The Process:

For this purpose, we were provided medical data by Icelandic Directorate of Health, various self-collected data such as social media usage, physical activity (FitBit) or Music usage (Spotify) provided by digi.me as well as financial data by Arion Banki.

So using the same data as a source, we ideated around that and tried to correlated what problems are Europeans facing in managing their healthcare. How could this type fo data help engage them further and improve their healthcare? 

Since we were on a time crunch, we focused on desk-research to validate the probelms we found – that not enough people make use of free checkups, that eventhough tracking apps and wearables are becoming commonplace, people rely on incorrect self-diagnosis of their conditions and there are still issues like inactivity and obesity in Nordic society.

 

Once we had decided this was the problem we would tackle, we split our team into developer and designer blocks. Naima and I worked on creating the user journeys through the app as well as creating the Sketch mockups for the front-end of the application. While Ferran, Javier and Kacper worked on setting up the basic infrastructure of the application and pull API data from the sources provided. We were then able to merge together the two parts, translating the Sketch screens into Flutter code using Super Nova Studio and then working directly with Flutter to ensure the application and its navigation and functions worked smoothly.

We worked through the night, sending our designated pitcher, Naima home to get some rest before the final pitch. In total we had about 24 hours to work on this entire project. 

 

Our developed mobile app retrieves real medical data, current activity data (e.g. FitBit) and credit card transaction categories to give individuals health check-up and vaccination recommendations, view and order medical prescriptions and book doctor appointments. These will allow users to actually make use of all this data that they collect themselves or have already to meaningfully improve their healthcare. As an example, a strong increase in sleep (FitBit data), a reduction in the workout time and/or higher heart rate within shorter workout time (FitBit data), a decreased weight (self-reported data) and an increase in food purchases (credit card transaction data) might indicate Diabetes Type 1. The app would then flag this potentially critical profile, suggest a doctor appointment and allow the user to book it straight from the app.  

To develop this application, we used data about vaccinations, appointments, prescriptions provided by the Iceland Health Ministry, Fitbit data provided through digi.me and credit card transaction data from Arion Banki.

Some sample screens from the application

The Outcome:

An Android application that used a person’s credit card transactional data as well as hospital medical records to manage personal health in an efficient and reliable manner.

Salud won the Arion Banki challenge as the best “novel use of financial data to help people lead healthier, happier lives” and was selected as runner-up in digi.me challenge. We were the only team that was acknowledged in two different challenges.

The GitHub repository for the application can be found here.

Final Pitch Deck