Best Gut
Hack for Health
As project manager for 4 person team, I led prototyping of a proof-of-concept biotech solution for my first hackathon, the Gupta Family Hackathon for Health Communication.
Stats
📖 Skills Upgrades: Biotech knowledge, prototyping, project management, pitching
💻 Platforms Used: Keynote
⏰ Est.Time Req.: 28 hrs (4 hrs registration and prep + 24 hrs Hacking)
Background
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| Dr. Sanjay Gupta |
I participated in the 2018 Hackathon for Health Communication, organized by the University of Michigan (UM) Insitute of Healthcare Policy and Innovation and supported by UM alumni (and CNN host!) Sanjay Gupta, M.D., and his wife Rebecca. The goal was to "hack" solutions to health communication challenges.
The Friday through Sunday event brought together over 120 students and professionals in the Ann Arbor and surrounding areas. Teams hacked 24 hrs to complete concepts, designs, prototypes, and business plans. Over 2 dozen UM faculty members and business leaders helped mentor us and judge final pitches.
Process
Pitch --> Team --> Hack --> Present
1. Pitch
The Friday night before the official kick-off, a handful of participants had attended a welcome reception by the Guptas and had the chance to mingle with fellow participants. I had only a smattering of ideas for the hackathon, but none had fully formulated. I knew I really wanted to practice leading a product development experience outside of my comfort zone at work, though, so I was up the whole night percolating ideas in my head. Trying my hand at a startup style event was my motivation to join the hackathon.
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| Pitching ideas to the audience |
“Ask not what you can poop, but what poop can do for you”
My health communication problem: Lack of self- preventative health tech
My solution: A device implanted in your toilet that could analyze your stool’s contents to diagnose your health right from home. The mechanism would be like a tube, analyze the stool and broadcasting the results to an app that both you and your internal provider could access.
2. Team
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| Forming teams |
The next step was very fun. People who pitched took their numbered balloon and stood outside the auditorium, waiting for audience members to walk up, ask questions, and determine if your team would be a good fit. It felt like I was the nucleous of a new element and my electrons were forming on me. Many questioners had taken notes from the intial pitches.
I guess I did a good job because the Q&A mingling resulted in 3 teammates. From an initial 48 pitches, 20 were able to form teams.
3. Hack
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| Brainstorming ideas with stickies |
My team's plan, segmented in appropriate time chunks:
-Brainstorm-Research
-Prototype
-Draft Presentation
-Present
My team's backgrounds (names aliased) were:
-Me, Automotive engineer
-Alpha, Web-developer
-Bravo, Biomedical engineering student
-Charlie, Retired accountant MBA
Brainstorm
During this phase, we agreed the device's purpose was clear but the design and science behind the device neeeded refinement. It was valuable practice for me to swallow my pride and step back from my initial idea to let others tear it apart. It was also a fantastic opportunity to put words to paper to elucidate our thoughts.
Research
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| Medical experts on-site helping teams |
The hackathon had no requirement for prior-knoweldge of Medicine. As we dug deeper, we realized we needed some advice on gastronomy. None of us had any clue of this subject! It was a fascinating dive into what is realistic or not to collect from human waste and sample. From our collective online research of prior work done on in-home testing kits, it was immediately apparent that there were some pioneers already trying to do similar things. Most products in the market were mail order kits in which stool was shipped back to a lab for further analysis. However, nobody had a in-built device into your toilet that could analyze everything on the spot.
Seeing that we needed help from experts, we contacted the organizers of the event. The Hackathon had done a good job of pre-assembling medical experts from the UM network to volunteer time to help teams. Two doctors were linked to us and graciously provided feedback on the human digestive system. It turns out that there is so much information in the microbiome in our bodies that is untapped.
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| Our Microbiome |
Our gut is really cool! In fact, there is actually a Microbiome project that the National Institute of Health has going on, much akin to the giant Human Genome Project completed in the past. Knowing this information on the microbiome of our body gave us a foundation of what we wanted to sample from the stool. With this science down, we went for the prototyping phase.
Prototype
For this hackathon, it was virtually impossible to obtain a physical prototype, so teams were encouraged to model up any thoughts on our computers. Our team knew we wanted a toilet device but needed a way to communicate information taken from it both to the user and to the internal physician. For this phase, we did a classic rush of iterative drawing. After all our research, it was a constant pen to paper drafting of different configurations of what a toilet device could look like. Charlie was well traveled and got us thinking of the European toilets that had a lip to catch stool so people looked at it, since the shape (according to the Bristol Stool Chart) and composition correlates to healthy bowel movement. So we knew factored in some kind of lip to catch the stool and then flush it away after it was diagnosed. Alpha had previous experience sailing, so the shape of a Catamaran insert was proposed. We quickly drew this all up, building in an inset into the toilet in a way that it could be removed if needed.
Lastly, we needed a phone app to make all the communication happen. We did a quick brainstorm of how this would look and made some preliminary sketches on paper..
Draft Presentation
This phase was straightforward documentation- taking all our thoughts and compiling into a presentation format. Alpha was skilled with Keynote, so we all provided content for this format. One neat thing I learned was taking stock images from icon libraries. This really helps make a presentation look clean. I eventually deployed this to future presetentations even at work, and it really helped.
We drafted well into the night, and the next day, after some more editing we spent a good deal of time practicing our 5 minutes worth of stage time.
Present
It was a marathon to the end, but I was truly proud of our final presentation.
Lasting thoughts
This hackathon solidified my desire to start a career pivot into project management (PM) and begin training myself on startup thinking. The pace at which things moved and the quick adapting required was a thrilling exposure, unlike anything I had ever come across in a cocooned corporate environment.
From a PM side, our diverse backgrounds were a challenge from the start. This was compounded by the fact that we were complete strangers.A key skill I quickly deployed over and over again was really listening to what others had to offer and tailoring every person's unique strength to the task at hand. For instance, Alpha was good at making aesthetically pleasing powerpoints in Keynote and really wanted to speak, so I stepped back and let him spearhead both for the final presentation. Bravo wanted to do a lot of recon work amongst all other teams to see what others were doing, so I encouraged that. It was quite funny to see Bravo hover over the shoulders of other teams and spy on what other team progress looked like and report back (every team did this at the end). Lastly, Charlie was more senior and was not in tune with current technology, but had a mentally challenged child. Charlie helped us by taking a focused look at designing around accessbility.
Another PM challenge was getting comfortable checking in on everybody's progress and making sure we kept to our schedule. We were often steered astray by some surprises from the hackathon staff (free snacks now! OR we need your drafts in 10 minutes! etc). Usually, I would employ a spreadsheet of sorts to track task flow or use a project management system such as JIRA. There comes a time, however, that sprint is so short that it takes just general intuition and basic common sense to do the tracking. It is not always worth setting up an entire infrastructure if the payoff is minimal. The biggest plus was our mindset that the hackathon was for fun, and we would do our best to adapt to sudden changes thrown at us.
Finally, leading a project does not always turn out victorious. We did not win, but the friendship we developed and the experience gained from the hackathon were well worth it. The hackathon really fulfilled some of my inner career desires and put me on a path to consume more.
More photos of the event
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