Professor Naomi Wray's group at UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience has recently gained $900,000 in funding to build upon and roll out nationally the Motor Neuron Disease patient symptom tracking system that began as a prototype at last year’s Health Hack Brisbane event.
“Show Me MND”, based on a Motor Neuron Disease patient-centred data collection, gained second prize in last year’s Health Hack, behind winning app, “Yarning”, which uses storytelling to help end-of-life care for Indigenous Australians.
Yarning is currently being developed further and will be rolled out to various Indigenous groups. Bioinformatician and software developer Thom Cuddihy of QCIF, QFAB and RCC, led development on the project.
Since Health Hack Brisbane began in 2013, many projects seeded at the data hackathon have either gone on to receive substantial further investment, or have formed the basis of grant applications.
MD Box, a repository for molecular dynamic simulations formed at Health Hack Brisbane 2015, led by Dr Karmen Condic-Jurkic from UQ’s Molecular Dynamics Group, went on to receive $500,000 in funding.
This year’s Health Hack Brisbane, which QCIF is co-sponsoring, is scheduled to take place over the weekend of 14–16 September.
The data hack event will bring researchers, students and healthcare professionals together with software developers, educators, engineers, designers and scientists to create innovative solutions to important healthcare and medical research problems.
Participation is free, whether you bring a research problem to the table as a researcher, or donate your skills to the hack as a software developer, user experience (UX) designer, data analyst or visualiser. Volunteer helpers are also being sought.
QCIF/RCC/IMB eResearch Analyst Dr Nick Hamilton will once again be lead "Problem Wrangler" for Health Hack, i.e. in charge of coordinating the problems to be solved.
"Health Hack is quite unique in the world of ‘hackathons’ in that it focuses on solving real-world problems brought to the hack by health professionals and researchers who need a solution. As such, many of the outcomes have been further developed well beyond Health Hack. Health Hack is a great way to network and build connections across health, IT, government and universities," said Dr Nick.
“This year we have Problem Wranglers across several institutions, with myself at UQ, Amanda Miotto (Griffith), Alan Robertson (TRI and QUT) and Roisin McMahon (Griffith), and we would expect to draw Problem Owners from all of these institutions and more widely.”
See the Health Hack website for further information and to sign up as a participant. Check out photos from last year’s Brisbane Health Hack.
Any queries, please contact Dr Nick: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Participants of Brisbane's 2017 Health Hack. (Photo: Dr Nick Hamilton, QCIF/RCC/IMB.)
A QCIF digital tool for data curation was launched at an open data event in Brisbane on Friday, 1 March.
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