Members of the sensor community came together at Sensor City last week to take part in an IoT hack challenge to find solutions to support those in need of future additional care.
Supported by Amazon Web Services, Innovate UK, and KTN, the week-long event was held to find and develop solutions for Liverpool City Council to incorporate into its ‘Help to Live at Home’ services.
Setting the challenge
#StitchHack got underway on Monday 11th September, when members from Liverpool City Council were on hand to talk through the challenges currently facing independent living services and to introduce teams to the data and wireless assets available.
Teams were set the challenge of stitching together data held by Liverpool City Council to reveal patterns and trends which offer important insights into the future and can be used to help develop solutions for those in need of care.
Our hackers had to consider what data to combine, how best to present their data for user engagement, and how to blend real-time and historic data.
With prizes up for grabs, including business development support for the most promising concepts, our teams went away to work on their solutions and prototypes. They reconvened on Friday for presentations and the all-important judging process.
The winning concept
The winning solution of the week came from DigiCreDis, which developed an unobtrusive hydration sensor to be used in the early detection of Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs), which are very dangerous to elderly people in care homes and hospitals. Originally used as a childhood enuresis (bedwetting) alarm, the DigiCreDis team repurp
osed their sensor technology for use with elderly residents of care homes and in hospitals.
Following the win, DigiCreDis founder, Max Zadow, said: “Over the last few years we have been doing some R&D which threw up some interesting results. We didn’t act on the data as it was not useful for the product we were developing at the time. While the plan was always to go back to these results, presenting this new approach to a group of commissioners and users at the ‘Stitches in Time’ Hack has made all the difference.
“To be told that what we could do was an urgent need in social care was one thing, to win the Hackathon means we are going to pursue developing this product much earlier than we would have planned to.
“This event was so vital in understanding the real needs of Adult Social Care. To be able to suggest and validate sensor and data driven solutions through events like this is gold for SMEs like ours.
“DigiCreDis is so grateful to Sensor City, Liverpool Council and the KTN, and of course the sponsors Amazon Web Services who made the event free for the city and were worth meeting in their own right.”
Taking home a £1,500 cash prize, together with the opportunity of a development project with Liverpool City Council, DigiCreDis now hopes to develop its sensor technology to be deployed across hospitals and care homes.
Other winners on the day were runners-up LIOT Care, DROB (Demographic Republic of Baldstyled) and Actionable Insights.
To find out more about future events at Sensor City, please click here.