On the 6th and 7th of September, fellow HullCSS member Dan and I travelled to Bridlington for the first Humber Care Tech Challenge. The event was hosted and sponsored by East Riding of Yorkshire Council, the University of Hull, Amazon, C4DI and the One Point, presenting us the challenge to come up with a technology to create solutions that help the elderly, infirm and others in care with their daily lives.

As we entered as a team of two, the organisers contacted us several days prior to pair us with another group of two, from the City Health Care Partnership. We’d never met before, but we welcomed these two guys to work with us on the solution. As it turned out, the guys weren’t Developers, so we used them as a great source of inspiration and ideas, due to their experience in the healthcare industry.

The idea we pitched in the first day was essentially Amazon Alexa for Care Homes, providing residents with information about their meals, activities, visitors, etc, and access to their nurses. It twinned this with a range of Smart Home and Smart Health tech, to allow staff and relatives to monitor the patients in terms of weight, blood pressure, etc, and to check they’ve closed doors, windows etc. This also allows our bed bound patients more control over their environment, allowing them to open curtains, turn off lights and more. The app also ran Intent Analysis across all requests, to pickup key words which might flag up signs of depression, dementia, etc, which can be used to flag a patient for a review with the Mental Health teams.

The judges were impressed with the idea, but we didn’t win the first day’s prizes, instead picking up the Peoples Choice Award for our concept. We’d developed a strong presentation showing the idea, and an Alexa Flash Briefing with some of the information that would be available.

The second day allowed us to commence with actual development, with us choosing to build an ASP MVC Application, on .NET Core, running on AWS. This provided a web interface for Care Home staff and Relatives to monitor the patients, and update information about activities and meals. This app also featured an API for use by Alexa, to retrieve information, pass data back etc.

The finished product came out looking really smooth and polished, despite us only taking the one day to work on it (we have the commit graph to prove it!). We managed to win both People’s Choice Award and the Best Solution prizes, taking home the first ever Care Tech Trophy, and an Echo Dot each to boot!

We’re not certain what the future holds for the solution we developed, but Dan and I continue to work on it. Who knows what the future will hold!

Overall the challenge was great fun, and I’d recommend you check out the next one in 2019! I went in with pretty much no knowledge of the inner workings of the healthcare sector, and all 13 teams produced a fantastic solution, several of which are progressing to full roll out!