‘I Feel Very Confident About the Future’.
When 40 visionary and tenacious minds convene with a shared purpose of improving the health of others, anything is possible. Such was the case for the participants of the inaugural Global Impact Challenge: Health & Human Rights Hackathon (GIC), which took place at the Boston University BUild Lab April 5-7, 2019.
The event was created and organized by second-year Master of Public Health students Anisha Borthakur and Mackenzie Bullard, as well as recent graduate Valentina Vega (SPH’19). Unlike traditional hackathons that place emphasis on technology-focused solutions to issues, this group assembled student innovators from the BU community and beyond with a goal to place humanity, human rights, and compassion at the forefront of health innovation.
“We want to develop a human design-thinking process that puts people over profit,” said Bullard, who also serves on the Innovate@BU Student Leadership Council. “This work will help revitalize the health and advance human well-being in the modern world. There are so many bad things going on. So let’s fix them, and let’s start today.”
In a whirlwind 48 hours, the students formed teams, identified either a public health or clinical problem or a community need, and hunkered down in the BUild Lab to devise a novel solution to their issue with the help of the GIC team, Innovate@BU staff, and other entrepreneurial mentors. Each group had to attribute their innovative solution to at least one article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as they competed for four $500 awards, as well as the opportunity to advance to the Innovate@BU Innovation Week showcase and pitch finale on April 23, with the potential to secure a spot in the Boston University Summer Accelerator Program and win a $10,000 prize to turn their idea into reality.
By 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, the groups presented their ideas—complete with videos, slideshows, and examples of their concepts—to an entrepreneurial and public health-oriented panel of judges including Associate Professor of Global Health James Wolff and second-year MPH student Dielle Lundberg.
Two teams won the Tech Innovation Award, which recognized a potentially viable product or service created in response to a human need. Those teams were Hand Hand Revolution, which introduced sign language software that would enable people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing to communicate more effectively with the hearing population; and the team Nuro, which developed a tactile feedback “NuroSole” device that would improve mobility for people with peripheral neuropathy.
The group winner of the Creative Media Award, which highlights an idea that embraces artistic expression to create social impact, was Team Every Hand is a Hero. The team aimed to combat sex trafficking by partnering with feminine hygiene product companies to disguise a QR code and trafficking hotline number in their products that are placed in public restrooms, which people could scan if they witness potential trafficking situations.
The research-focused Knowledge Gap Award was presented to Project Green Temple, a team that sought to address the lack of clean water available in Odisha, India, by researching previous efforts that were unsuccessful and by developing a harvesting net to capture and purify fog and rainwater.
First-year MPH student Bria Kilkenny, who was part of Project Green Temple, said she would be interested in implementing or scaling up the group’s project.
“It’s really cool to have a project like this that is tangible and that you can implement,” Kilkenny said. “I feel like it’s a moral obligation that if you have a good idea, you should share it with others.”
Second-year MPH student Kyra Neal, who was one-third of the Nuro team, said the days flew by as her group members raced to finalize their proposal.
“It was great to develop an idea like this under pressure,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about school or work or anything else this entire time.”
The GIC co-chairs said they were impressed and inspired by the scope and depth of the concepts and projects each group formulated in two short days.
“Easily the most rewarding aspect of being a part of the hackathon was interacting with the teams and seeing them grow over the course of 48 hours,” Borthakur said. “Their passions shined through their questions and energy, and I could not be more proud of the work each team put into their ideas to hack the interaction of health and human rights.”
“It makes me feel like there’s a good future ahead,” Vega said of the weekend experience, which the group intends to make an annual event. “It makes me feel confident that my colleagues and people in my age group are looking to innovate from a caring perspective—they care about people, and they think about people when they’re creating things. I feel very confident about the future.”