Health Hackathon

Cornell Tech | Johnson & Johnson

In March 2017, I attended the Health Tech Hackathon at Cornell Tech in NYC sponsored by Johnson and Johnson.

I did product design and prototyping for my team.  In 26 hours I learned Unity3D (Virtual Reality Software) and created a method for users to learn how to control anxiety, cope with stressful situations, and learn meditation without the need of a coach by adding visual meditation techniques to real-life 360 environments (both calm and stress-inducing) that utilizes biometric feedback including EEG, heartbeat, and breath-monitoring for a self calibrating protocol (SCP) that doesn't exist in meditation wearables currently on the market. I created a 2 minute VR demo with the Oculus Rift that we did live during a 4 minute pitch at the end of the hackathon, and made a business canvas and Product-Market Fit Pyramid as part of our business model.

With this idea, technology, and demo, my team won 1st Place in the Virtual Reality Vertical of the competition.

Re:minder

The healthcare sector with the most room to grow and greatest disruption from emerging technology is in diagnosing and treating mental disorders. Before the introduction of current technology, there was very little being done in the way of treating the millions of mental disorders that afflict our populations, especially disorders like depression and anxiety. Medication only works so well, and often the side affects make symptoms worse. I have a friend who was given medication for depression for a year and a half that 1) didn’t help his depression and 2) gave him horrible sleep problems that made his condition worse. He eventually weaned himself off the medication and dealt with it on his own. But today’s technological innovations can offer safer, more effective alternatives to unpredictable medications.

For example, VR technology can help people escape their realities if they are painful or stressful, and guide them through meditation or scenarios that can calm them down, help train their minds to cope, and let them learn things in a new, more immersive way. VR technology can also help healthcare providers understand what their patients are going through, creating scenarios that mimic what patients see and hear that healthcare providers can then experience for themselves. Smartphone applications in medicine in general (not just for mental disorders) can lead to better tracking of patients’ progress, symptoms, and medication routines, which help doctors better diagnose and treat their patients. Interactive devices and the use of biometric data have the potential to change healthcare for patients, and general wellness for all people.

The Journey We Created

I created wireframes for the Journey I wanted to create for the user (right).

Starting with a calibration of the user's self-diagnosed stress levels to the biometric signals our program receives from the brainwave headset (Muse) the user is wearing.  The VR then takes the user through a breathing exercise, slowly introducing 360º Video environments to help the user associate the breathing techniques with real-life situations.  When the user is calm enough based on the calibrated brainwaves, we introduce the user to a stressful environment such as public speaking in a room full of people.  We keep the guided meditation video in view of the user to teach them to use this technique while under stress.  This is meditation coaching without the need for a coach.

Teamwork

I was really surprised at how well our team worked together and flowed. It could have to do with the fact that we were working on a meditation guide, so the whole time that I felt like we were on a time crunch I was also weirdly at peace from continuously staring at this moving ball animation that I made around 4pm on Saturday. If anything, I think we could have been more focused on getting things done. I found that I was the person on the team every so often having to say, “Okay, so what’s our next step? What are we getting done right now?” as my teammates had a tendency to wander and socialize with the mentors and people running the hackathon. But I also learned very quickly from John and Sam, who have been to many hackathons before, that the whole point of this weekend was to network, talk about ideas, and learn from really amazing mentors like Tom Leahy from Embodied Labs who worked with us the whole weekend. Sure, getting our MVP into a 5-minute presentation was important, but it wasn’t worth stressing out over when we’re focused on the big picture and the future of this idea. I went to the Big Idea Competition at Cornell at the end of April, and was so enthused to find that three of the finalist groups were people that I work really closely with in my activities. One presenter was one of my co-leads on my project team, two more were Kessler Fellows (of which I am as well), and the last was Sam - who was presenting our hackathon project under the new name MindShift. And MindShift won first place! So, clearly, I’m hanging out with the right crowd, and I’m really invested in the future of MindShift.

To be a more conventional team, we could have definitely defined our roles better and declared a leader of our team, but for some reason the relaxed approach we took on this endeavor seemed to work really well. This may be due to the fact that the tangible product we made was the VR experience, and that was something that I had complete control over. It took all of the ideation and expanding of ideas and drawings that the whole team did, but then I was able to sit down and work on the coding for several hours and turn it into a reality without having to worry about other people doing things that I needed to wait for. If we were to continue this project, which we very well might at this point, better division of labor would definitely be called for.

The key thing that I think allowed us to win the VR Vertical at the hackathon as well as work really well as a team was that John and Sam came to the hackathon already believing in the potential of their idea. The hackathon for this idea was not just a weekend where the idea would be born, grown, and then put away; it was used as the first stepping stone for taking meditation therapy to the next level. They were the first group to pitch their idea on Friday night, and as someone with primary interests in wearable tech and neuroscience, I knew immediately that I wanted to join their team. This interest and excitement about the product kept me engaged, flexible, and energized throughout those long 32 hours that I was up. I was also the only developer on the team. And by that, I mean I was the one who decided I could learn Unity from scratch to make our MVP and was dedicated to staying up all night to make it happen. Thank goodness for Tom Leahy. The last, and most important element to our success at the hackathon was the fact that Sam had actually reached out personally to Tom a few weeks before the hackathon to get him to come.  Knowing who we wanted to be our mentor, getting him out to Cornell Tech, and getting to work almost exclusively with him for the entire hackathon was the foundation of us having anything to show at all. Everything I learned how to do on Unity was because Tom directed every click of the mouse that I made. I really hope to get more involved and experienced with VR, because I can see how much potential there is for VR in health and medicine- looks like the Health Hackathon did its job.

Personal Growth

My way is definitely not always the best way, but I’m very open to learning about and trying out other people’s methods in order to see if I can use them to adapt mine into a more efficient and/or more enjoyable way. As this was my first hackathon, I came in with the mindset that it would be like any other project with a hard deadline—work hard on it for as many hours straight as you can handle, and make sure you have lots of coffee and snacks within arms reach.

And essentially, that is what I did, but the tunnel vision concept of “work = finished project” that I had was not what the weekend was about. 

Saturday morning started off very slow. I got there exactly at 9 am, and my other teammates didn’t show up until 10:30. I thought we wanted to get an early start? I thought every second mattered whenyour time is so limited? And then, for the first four hours, it seemed like there was a total of only 20 minutes when everyone was in the same room (the four of us and our mentor). Every time I tried to help create the plan for our completion, someone else was walking out or walking in. I heard and helped explain our idea to random mentors 12 times, having the same conversation, answering the same questions people had—and it really frustrated me that my teammates kept doing this. It felt like a waste of valuable time. But halfway through the day, when progress was still slow and it felt like we hadn’t accomplished anything, I realized that talking to people and sharing your vision with whoever would listen was the whole point of the hackathon. Regardless of what we could achieve in 27 hours, if this was an idea worth pursuing, the most important part was to get as many people on board and interested as possible. So that was really cool for me, understanding that taking your time to talk and explore as many possibilities for the project as possible was the real foundation of what we were to get done. I realized that I couldn’t really rely on some of the team to sit down and do a task that would directly help the VR portion of our project, but the MVP was only a small portion of why we were here.

And also, turns out that the hours between 6am and 11am are enough to do a whole lot of Unity coding and everything before that doesn’t really matter.

This hackathon might be one of the most important things for myself I’ve done at Cornell, along with my project team and joining the Kessler Fellows Program. It not only opened my eyes to the world of VR and agile thinking, but it’s given me an astounding amount of new direction in my future goals, especially for it being only a 2 and a half day event in my life. I learned how to focus on the big picture and stress less about the details, and how a team can really work and thrive when they share the goal, vision, and open mindedness. I see myself working with VR and wearable technology in the future (in the near future!), and I even started going to weekly meditation events at Cornell after working on this project. Last summer I worked at Lumo Bodytech for my Kessler Fellowship, which is a wearable startup focusing on running technology for personal coaching. It’s a very similar approach to using wearable tech as we did with Re:Minder with the Muse headset—creating an experience where you can self-teach meditation and stress relaxation the same way Lumo aims to help you self-coach in athletics. I can’t wait to see what new opportunities I can find to take me even further.

Final Takeaways

When I’m focused on getting things done, I am extremely focused, and it gets done. The consistent coffee may have helped, but it was surprisingly easy for me to stay up throughout the entire night to get as much done as someone who’s just learned how to use this software could get done. I had to learn a little bit of patience, as it was often frustrating when things weren’t moving along as fast as Iwanted them to. But, I definitely think that it was better for us to have spend the majority of Saturday ideating and refining ideas without creating anything before actually getting down to work. Having everything sorted out on paper made theactual product development process so much smoother because we had a clear, shared vision of what we wanted every aspect of the end product to look like. Of course, we didn’t create that end product. We got maybe halfway there, but we had something that vaguely resembled our vision, and that’s a good starting place. I also reaffirmed from this experience that I love working in small teams (provided they’re the right people), and I have an affinity for the startup culture and agile thinking process. Seeing how well some of my teammates were able to sell Re:Minder to mentors and judges makes me really want to improve my skills in networking and pitching—one day that might come in real handy.