Life Hacking can mean anything from brushing your teeth in the shower to saving time while your conditioner sets to surgically implanting earbuds into your earlobes.'Health Hacking,' on the other hand, is a relatively new concept born in Canada that takes the problem-solving and DIY aspects of maker culture and projects that onto the health industry at large. It brings together technology and health professionals and encourages collaboration and problem solving.
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Founded by Jeeshan Chowdhury, an honest to goodness Rhodes Scholar, Hacking Health began while he was studying in Montreal. The first Health Hacking Hackathon was held there in 2012, but in only two short years the organization has held Hackathons all over the world, most recently Zurich and Hong Kong this year, though they remain Canadian with a head office in Montreal.The Hackathons are essentially pop up think tanks that run for a weekend. 200-300 people come in with project goals in mind, band together with all of the intellectual muscle they have access to and grind out solutions. Sometimes a group can be given a challenge or come in with their own projects to refine and work out. Health Hacking also host more informal 'cafes', which are essentially meet and greets, along with traditional workshops. The real meat are the Hackathons, however.
One of the many Hackathons the group puts on.
They're visceral, fun and has proven to be wildly successful, not only for Chowdhury who managed to find enough spare time to also launch List Runner earlier this year, a cloud-based medical patient information tracking app.Some of the many success stories from previous Hackathons include Auti-sim, which was developed over a 3 day Hackathon in Vancouver last year. The game is a simulation of the real world as an autistic child and it is haunting and effective.
VitalClik built out a 'make an app in 24 hours' challenge and it tracks a patient's recovery while beaming information back to the hospital. The idea is to cut down on hospital re-admissions and to have a constant stream of information to better serve patients and doctors.Another is Breath.io, a quit-smoking app which using wearables and the motion sensors in your phone can actually track your physical smoking habits on a drag-by-drag basis to give you real-time data on your nicotine levels.These are only three examples of the wide variety of products that come out of the Health Hacking Hackathons. The exponential growth after only a few years is inspiring and this is just the tip of the iceberg for what combing hacker culture and medical expertise can accomplish.
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VitalClik built out a 'make an app in 24 hours' challenge and it tracks a patient's recovery while beaming information back to the hospital. The idea is to cut down on hospital re-admissions and to have a constant stream of information to better serve patients and doctors.Another is Breath.io, a quit-smoking app which using wearables and the motion sensors in your phone can actually track your physical smoking habits on a drag-by-drag basis to give you real-time data on your nicotine levels.These are only three examples of the wide variety of products that come out of the Health Hacking Hackathons. The exponential growth after only a few years is inspiring and this is just the tip of the iceberg for what combing hacker culture and medical expertise can accomplish.