Nothing defies people’s expectations about Cleveland as a rustbelt city more than the fact that it is one of the nation’s top centers for healthcare and medical research. The world-famous Cleveland Clinic certainly contributes to this reputation, but University Hospitals and MetroHealth systems also consistently earn high ratings for patient care and innovation — joining other hospitals, medical schools, and bioscience incubators (e.g., BioEnterprise, Health Tech Corridor). Cleveland’s healthcare sector has grown over 20% in the past 15 years, making it the area’s largest growth sector employing over 177,000 people in a region of just over 3 million.
As part of the community health and wellness track, competitors were encouraged to use local community health data made available at Health Data Matters to create solutions focused on ways that social, economic, environmental, and behavioral factors affect health. Could records from a half million phone calls that have come in to the United Way 2-1-1 Call for Help line and from more than 30,000 deaths examined by the Office of the Medical Examiner enable us to better meet residents’ needs or to predict changing health trends? Sheon helped garner participation from public health departments, experts, and community health advocates in addition to the techies, docs, and nurses attending.
I wish I could tell the story of every one of the 21 projects that came out of the event (see a full list here), but the first place winner (IQ Sensor Solutions) demonstrates how the worlds of engineering and medicine can come together to create something unexpected and exciting.
IQ Sensors is a wearable blood pressure monitor that utilizes a flexible 3D printed nano-tube sensor to measure stretch, force, and/or temperature. It has been in research & development for the last four years at the University of Akron.
The IQ Sensors hackathon team set out to measure blood pressure through a wearable device that a patient could put on their arm. The flexible sensor would mimic a traditional sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff) and then send real-time blood pressure readings to an app. The sensor and electronic components are mounted on the bicep, eliminating the need of an airbag.
http://makezine.com/2015/11/12/sensors-and-data-dominate-the-cleveland-medical-hackathon/
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