LKCMedicine Students Bag Two Awards at Beyond! HealthHack2021

A team comprising five LKCMedicine students clinched the Judges’ Pick and Audience’s Pick awards at Beyond! Health Hack '21, Singapore's largest student healthcare hackathon organised by the NUS Pharmaceutical Society. This year’s edition, held over a two-week period in July, saw 45 teams from local universities and polytechnics taking part.

The virtual competition gathered student entrepreneurs, healthcare and industry experts together to brainstorm on how to tackle a series of real-world challenges that stand in the way of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) prevention, treatment and chronic care through technological innovations. Participants gained the opportunity to collaborate, ideate and solve real problems while being mentored by experts from the fields of NCDs, MedTech, public health and life sciences.

Participants brainstormed on how to tackle real-world challenges that stood in the way of NCDs prevention, treatment and chronic care. They conceptualised unique solutions in all forms, from individual level, such as social media campaigns, to system level changes in healthcare administration. With support from the event sponsors and partners, participants had the opportunities to join pre-hack workshops, discussion sessions and masterclasses with experts to level up and empower their ideation.

The LKCMedicine team, named OActive, comprised Year 4 students Angeline Aw, Megan Chua, Ong Kay Hsiang, Sean Lim and Year 2 student Darren Chong. They conceptualised an AI-based app that combines telehealth and physiotherapy to gamify exercises for the elderly suffering from early-stage osteoarthritis. While doing their clinical rotations as medical students, they encountered many elderly who were unsure of how to properly manage osteoarthritis or lack the motivation to do so. This was behind the inspiration for their app and device. With their clinical knowledge and patient interactions, they could better address their problem statement and ensure that patients’ needs are met with the device they had conceptualised.

Recalling their experience in this hackathon, Angeline said, “Our strength was actually also our weakness. All of us have a common background as medical students and we lacked perspectives in terms of technology, engineering, and business. Hence, the learning curve was steep but precisely because of that, we could explore medicine beyond the clinical realm and gained valuable insights into innovation and business development.”

As one of the three teams who clinched the Judges’ Pick award, the team won a three-month Commercialisation Mentorship worth $8,000 to develop their idea. For the Audience’s Pick Award, the prize was a CATALYST Incubator Membership worth $2,000.

The team hopes to capitalise on the mentorship to prototype their idea and take it to market in the future.  Well done guys!

You can catch the final presentation pitch by Team OActive here.