MedTuner Takes First Place at the Developers’ World Cup Final

Health 2.0 Developers’ World Cup judging took place at the San Francisco code-a-thon this past weekend. Though the two-day code-a-thon that was going on in the background was focused around behavior change and encouraging healthy habits, the theme for World Cup projects was wide open. Submissions ranged from apps that integrate with wearable devices, to an improved and squeaky clean version of the FDA’s adverse reactions database.

Competing teams flew in from Shanghai, New Delhi, Fukushima, Stockholm, Washington, D.C., Boston and New York City, where they each had previously won coding competitions. This weekend they had to show up with new ideas, unrelated to their winning pitches. A panel of six judged submissions on technical chops, user design, market potential and the originality of the idea.

The video above already gives away which team came in first. Watch it to learn more about the MedTuner method, and keep reading to find out which creative and well-executed applications took second and third places. Team Fukushima won Honorable Mention for the creation of a disaster management app.

First place: Team New York City, MedTuner
Prize: $10,000 and a demo on the Health 2.0 Annual Conference stage

MedTuner uses natural language processing to monitor tweets for health-related information that people post about themselves. It analyzes those tweets and then smartly offers relevant advice and resources. It’s an opt-in service; users follow @MedTuner on Twitter, and it follows them back. This way, it can send information to followers via private message.

Team New York City gave five use case examples: suicide prevention, CDC travelers’ health, monitoring for signs of postpartum depression, rare disease clinical trial matching, and Medline Plus drug safety and side effects alerting.

The judges said this project won because the technology does all of the work, and the patient has to put in little conscious effort in order to experience the benefit.

Second place: Team New Delhi, wearable sensor
Prize: $1,000

Team New Delhi created an integrated wearable health device using off the shelf electronics. The team’s target audience is the elderly population. Users can stitch the sensor into a piece of clothing, and it will continuously collect GPS data, record body temperature, and it can tell if a patient has fallen down. The device can also alert users to take their medications at the appropriate times. The platform uses open APIs so that it can integrate with medical records and other devices.

Third place: Team Stockholm, mobile asthma spirometer
Prize: $500

This team built a spirometer that integrates with a smartphone to monitor respiratory diseases like asthma and COPD. Users blow into the device (it alerts them if they take the at-home test improperly), and the data flows to the app. The smartphone keeps a patient profile over time. The app can tell users about their risk factors based on information like geographical location. The team said the app can also lead to the development of public datasets that show where events like asthma hospitalizations are most prevalent.