Link for registration: https://pittchallenge.com/

Welcome to the sixth annual Pitt Challenge!

We are a student-led hackathon and we aim to provide an environment to sustain a global effort from students from all over the world on October 21nd-22th in person. We want everyone - pharmacy students, engineers, designers, and more - to come and help solve some of the biggest challenges facing healthcare and pharmacy today. Happy hacking!

For Healthcare Students

Even if you have no coding experience, your team will need your insights into the world of healthcare and pharmacy. Keep in mind that your fellow participants are students like yourself, and everyone is trying to work together to learn and develop amazing ideas.

For Tech-Based Students

Even if you have no experience with healthcare or pharmacy, your team will need your ability to rapidly produce software from ideas. Your team will provide the healthcare background that you need to succeed. Remember that everyone will be learning to build something together.

Requirements

1. Building an application
We highly encourage an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) of your idea with code and a working demo. No-code proofs of concept are accepted but will be marked for no code. Cheating is not tolerated and cheating is working on your idea before the hackathon official start time (10/21 @ 6:00 PM). There are anti-cheating measures from Devpost and MLH so please do not cheat!

No cross submissions: You cannot submit your application if you are submitting to other hackathons.

2. Submitting a video

To show your project, you must make a presentation about your awesome project! This presentation should at least have the following slides:

Team Introductions
Problem statement
Solution proposal
Demo

The presentation should be under 3 minutes with an emphasis on the problem statement, solution proposal, and demo.

To submit the recording of your presentation, there will be an option to add a video when you are completing the submission form.

Prizes

$10,137 in prizes

Overall 1st Place

$3000 Cash Prize

Overall 2nd Place

$2000 Cash Prize

Overall 3rd Place

$1000 Cash Prize

Patient Engagement

$500 Cash Prize. Patients (and the people that take care of them) experience better outcomes if they understand what is happening with their health. Often, engaging in our medical system can be a confusing, scary, expensive, and gate-kept experience - and clinical trials are no exception. Most people simply don’t “speak the language” of medicine. Layered on top of that, sometimes people simply don’t abide by their care plan. They may not understand it, it may have too much burden or maybe they just don’t like going to the doctor. How might you help patients stay engaged via technology?

Health Equity and Diversity

$500 Cash Prize. Racial, socioeconomic, and geographic factors play a part in who has reliable and consistent access to healthcare. Ensuring equitable access is not only the right thing to do but allows a broader portion of society to get access to promising new potential therapies, and contribute to scientific advancement. Think about how technology can help open doors beyond typical wealthy and white clinical trial participants. Be mindful that language barriers and technological proficiency impact many communities.

Where Digital Doesn’t Work

$500 Cash Prize. It might seem a bit counterintuitive to consider solutions outside of digital for a Hackathon focused on digital health, but it’s critical to consider serving patients that may not have access to smartphones, wi-fi or laptops - or may not possess technological literacy. How do we implement solutions to keep patients engaged and reach out to diverse communities when the commonly used tech might be limited? Think about things like - underserved patients without devices, rural communities without reliable internet, patients with limited or no proficiency in English, etc.

Patient Safety Tech

$500 Cash Prize. Do no harm. Medical errors are responsible for more than 250,000 deaths each year, making it the third leading cause of death annually in the United States. Misread instructions, incorrect doses, and wrong site surgeries are all examples of medical error that can occur across the healthcare continuum. Supporting the practice and workflow of clinicians, using data to double check processes, and empowering patients to play a proactive role in their care can improve care. Our challenge to you is to leverage technology to improve the safety of patients.

Lifestyle as Medicine

Prize - Honeywell HPA100 True HEPA Air Purifier.
Patients spend 99.9% of their lives outside of healthcare clinics. Our challenge to you is to incorporate activities of daily living such as nutrition, sleep, mental health, and exercise as key components of both health and everyday life.

Increasing Health Literacy

Prize - Kodak Flik X7 HD Home Theater LED Projector
Health literacy has been a major point of contention in past years. Many announcements from the scientific community have had mixed uptake. Common issues have revolved around COVID, vaccines, and infection prevention. However, improving health literacy is a long standing opportunity in the US. Complicating the situation, there is a significant amount of information online that is created to sell products that have no scientific basis. Our challenge to you is to create robust solutions to help improve health literacy for COVID and beyond.

Honorable Mention

Prize - LG SP2 100W Stereo Soundbar (speaker)

Going Face-to-facetime

Prize - Amazon Echo Show
Healthcare used to be synchronous, face-to-face, or a game of phone tag. Our challenge to you is to create future of healthcare when we leverage technology to fit the lives of patients and clinicians instead of the other way around.

Big Data and Machine Learning

Prize - JBL Flip 5 Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker
Data is being generated at an incredible rate. Though these data sets may have been created for a specific purpose, leveraging data to develop other products is an incredible opportunity. Managing data has been more and more difficult. With the advent of machine learning, these data can be leveraged as training sets to automatically process data. Our challenge to you is to find the ways that big data and machine learning to make advances in healthcare.

Virtual Medical Simulation

Prize - JBL Live Pro 2 Noise-Canceling True Wireless In-Ear Headphones (Black). In the past year, clinicians, patients, and healthcare students have shifted in-person experiences canceled due to the risk of COVID spread. Virtual medical simulations have become more and more important in helping multiple stakeholders when an in-person option isn’t available. Other fields have leveraged virtual simulations for years. Flight simulators have helped pilots and astronauts gain crucial experience and robotic surgery simulators have helped surgeons train their hands without a human under the knife. Our challenge to you is to find new ways can we leverage technology to help clinicians, patients, or learners leverage more realities.

Best Domain Name from Domain.com

Register a .Tech domain name using Domain.com during the weekend for your chance to win a Domain.com branded backpack for you and each member of your team! Each team may submit one entry per person on the team. The more creative the domain the better!

Most Creative Use of GitHub

GitHub is one of the best ways to collaborate, push code, get feedback, and show the world what you’ve built during a hackathon. To take it a step further, GitHub is now offering you access to industry tools, events & learning resources through something called GitHub Global Campus. Win this weekend’s Best Use of GitHub prize category, first by signing up for GitHub Global Campus and second by using a GitHub repository to host your hackathon project’s code! Make sure your use of GitHub stands out with a detailed ReadMe page, meaningful pull requests and collaboration history, and even a GitHub pages deployment!

Best Accessibility Hack sponsored by Fidelity

Fidelity Branded Wireless Charger At Fidelity, accessibility is viewed as a major key to the success of their business, which is why they are challenging you to come up with innovative ways to make tech more accessible! We want you to use your hacking skills to find and build solutions that put opportunities and resources within reach to all communities. The team with the best accessibility hack will win a Fidelity branded wireless charger for each team member!

Best Use of Velo by Wix

We know how difficult it can be to create a phenomenal website in a short period of time, especially when it comes to hackathons. Velo by Wix cuts down your development without sacrificing on functionality! With a built-in database and fully customizable JavaScript front-end and back-end, you can develop a full-stack application directly in your browser. With Velo, all the tools you need are conveniently located in one platform! Build your hackathon project with Velo by Wix for a chance to win Wacom Drawing Tablets for you and each of your teammates.

Best Sustainability Hack sponsored by Avanade

Avanade has put sustainable tech at the forefront of their ongoing mission! Sustainability is about conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources and focusing efforts to reduce and improve the environmental impact of technology, processes, and operations on our planet and society. For your hackathon project, we want you to make a genuine human impact using your ingenuity to address sustainability through an innovative use of technology. Demonstrate how you can create a more sustainable future and help the environment. As an added bonus, the team with the best sustainability hack will be rewarded with awesome lego sets!

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judging Criteria

Technical Complexity Achieved
How technically ambitious was the project? How much did the team complete? (Weighted)
Problem
How clearly was the problem defined? How directly was it linked to a user's pain/need (empathy)? (Weighted)
Creativity
Does the solution attempt to solve the problem in a novel way?
Feasibility
How practical is the solution as it pertains to the end-user?
Value
How large is the market potential and/or human impact? How likely are you to recommend this solution for someone with the presented problem? (Weighted) What % of your investable income would you invest on this solution?

Benedum Hall	Public
$10,137 in prizes	78 participants

Pitt Challenge 2022

Create applications to disrupt the world of healthcare!

Who can participate