Hacking Health Berlin, in cooperation with Fraunhofer Venture and the Berlin Institute for Health (BIH) of the Charité University Hospital Berlin , organized a Hacking Female Health Hackathon with 100+ participants in November 2018. The goal of the 48-hour Hackathon was to create and implement concrete solutions for patient-oriented treatment options in healthcare for girls and women. Five different challenges were selected  for the Hackathon including breast cancer, infections of the female reproductive organs and urinary tract, endometriosis, female mental health and incontinence. Innovations in these and other areas can be developed to detect conditions early and accurately, support medical professionals to provide better care and improve health outcomes.

Participants (including doctors, patients, medical professionals, scientists, engineers, designers, software developers and business experts) formed interdisciplinary teams to convert their ideas into prototypes for medical devices and apps. The teams were supported throughout the entire process  by professional mentors with an extensive variety of expertise from different fields as well as design thinking experts that guided the design and development process.

At the closing public conference “Digital Health Brunch”, leading experts from different healthcare related fields discussed the current status, barrieres and potentials of innovation in the field of female healthcare.

Introduced by keynotes from Prof. Dr. Sabine Oertelt-Prigione, Professor of sex- and gender-sensitive medicine, Radboud University and  Isabell Vezina, Managing Director of Hacking Health Global emphasizing the importance of innovation in healthcare the teams presented their solutions they’ve been intensively working on for the past 48 hours ranging from hardware prototypes for bacterial infections and incontinence to apps and AI solutions against postpartum mental health.

The top three teams received cash prizes totalling €6,000. In addition, five teams were given the unique opportunity to participate in the Fraunhofer and the Hasso-Plattner-Institute accelerator programs to further develop their ideas and prototypes until they are ready for market access.

Throughout the two-and-a-half days of the first Hacking Health Berlin Hackathon at the Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 15 teams created outstanding solutions for diverse medical problems. The interdisciplinary teams discussed medical problems, analyzed large amounts of data, plus designed and created software and hardware tools on important challenges, defined together with clinicians and experts from the Charité University Hospital. As a result, solutions against blood loss, diabetes, depression, stress, anxiety and many other health-related conditions were created and presented at the final ceremony.

Our vision to tackle important challenges in healthcare and enable interdisciplinary teams to create relevant and meaningful solutions. With this in mind, we invited healthcare professionals, scientists, patients, entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, developers, and other interested parties to team up over a weekend to propel innovation in healthcare. Together, we gathered more than 100 experts to work on five  healthcare challenges and compete in a hackathon for prizes and a place in our mentoring program. The challenges focused on bringing innovative digital technology into our healthcare system, as well as supporting healthcare professionals and patients.

As for the first of it’s kind Hackathon in Berlin we were impressed by the outstanding quality of the solutions created by the teams during the Hackathon, as well as the consistent positive feedback we received. 

The Artificial Pancreas Meetup in Barcelona, supported by Hacking Health, Nightscout Foundation, Hospital Universitari Parc Tauli and Stiftung Charité, included an impressive list of international speakers and panel members who discussed the potentials, new developments and new innovations about artificial pancreas and closed-loop insulin delivery systems. Throughout the Meetup attendees enjoyed a wide variety of presentations and talks, offering new ideas on many topics. They listened to people with diabetes (PwD) and their friends and families, developers, health care professionals, mathematicians and sociologists among others. The audience was very engaged and had an intense dialogue followed by a panel discussion with key stakeholders from the DIY community, industry and research.

Diabetes is a full-time job—and a hard one. It can interrupt your sleep and give you a hard time during the day. It can be exhausting and make you sick, as well as lead to long-term complications and depression. But with the addition of automated systems, diabetes is much more manageable. This can be seen through the outcomes of open-source loop system users.

PwD have different needs, ideas, lifestyles and issues to solve. The reason why DIY APS works perfectly for so many people is that each individual can customize and individualize their own system as needed. PwD want and need interoperability and flexibility when it comes to diabetes devices.

In the beginning of 2017 together with the software experts from ThoughtWorks we held the first ever Healthcare Hackathon in Berlin focusing on how we can improve patient care by using digital technologies with around 25 experts; including physicians, psychologists, nurses, scientists, patients, entrepreneurs, engineers, designers and developers. In five multidisciplinary teams, participants conceived innovative ideas within healthcare, worked on different healthcare challenges and competed in the hackathon for long-term project support. 

Physicians use magnetic fields and pill-mounted cameras for imaging, robots to perform surgeries, and lasers to fix vision. And yet, in so many other ways the field of medicine seems stuck in the past. Innovation in patient care requires experts from many different fields such as physicians, developers, designers and entrepreneurs. Senior physicians, for example, may contribute their clinical wisdom, and developers may inform about the vast possibilities of current technology. However, at present these experts normally do not work closely together. The ThoughtWorks Hackathon provided an interdisciplinary platform, enabling professionals from various disciplines to profit from other experts in diverse fields, as well as the possibility to jointly create innovation in healthcare.

In March 2016 we held an exciting biohacking workshop, allowing participants to become gene scientists for a day. We invited developers, engineers, doctors, nurses and designers to learn basic genetic techniques in a real scientific lab—and learn about their own gene fingerprints in the process.

Using polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a key method in any gene lab that amplifies a specific piece of DNA almost indefinitely, the participants explored their genetic fingerprint. This makes it possible to recover information from very small or degraded samples. Apart from forensics, PCR is very useful in detecting traces of genetically-modified food or identifying disease-causing agents early upon infection.

Equipped with new biological skills and inspired by fresh insights, participants transformed into powerful interdisciplinary teams of the future, ready to tackle tough challenges in digital healthcare.

The Let’s Get Physical – Rapid Prototyping Workshop brought together doctors, nurses, medical students, designers and developers to learn about basic electronic prototyping. The one-day event provided the 35 participants with basic knowledge and skills in the field of electronics and prototyping. Thanks to the help of numerous tutors and learning pathways, all participants were able to transform early ideas into tangible products with their new skills.

The workshop started with a show and tell session from startups with self-build prototypes and an introduction to basic concepts of electronic prototyping. Participants were also given the option to choose from the following three topics to work on: 

1. building a simple prototype to measure the oxygen levels in the blood, 
2. building your own angle measurement tool (prevention and rehab tool), or 
3. building a device that can read emotions and facial expressions.

The interactive introduction to the topic Electronics & Arduino was initiated by Stefan Hermann, lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and author of the book Learning Arduino. Stefan taught the participants the most important basics for independent work with electronic components. At the end of the workshop, all participants were able to use electronic components to measure, evaluate and visualize a large number of vital data.

The Artificial Pancreas Meetup in Berlin was a full-day session for people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, doctors, researchers, health care professionals, tech experts, and other curious minds interested in learning about the artificial pancreas or closed-loop insulin delivery system. In-depth knowledge on commercial and do-it-yourself (DIY) methods was shared throughout the event by experts in this field.

The Meetup started off with an introduction by Klemens Raile, M.D about the concept and the functionalities of an artificial pancreas. Dr. Katarina Braune, discussed findings from science on commercial and DIY artificial pancreas systems. A number of other presentations followed from experts on topics ranging from requirements for the Closed Loop, AndroidAPS, OpenAPS, iOS Loop and patients’ legal rights as a looper.

This Hacking Health Meetup was powered by #dedoc°, Charité – University Medicine Berlin Department of Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes, ThoughtWorks Berlin, Diabetes Life Hacks and the Nightscout Foundation. 

Hacking Health Berlin organized a discussion on the implications of digital health technologies and the Digitale-Versorgung-Gesetz (Digital Care Law, DVG) for patients and the wider health system. Can digital health apps improve patient outcomes? Is it a good idea to let them collect your data? And should the government pay for them? These were among the points addressed by the four keynote speakers Dr. Henrik Matthies (Managing Director – Health Innovation Hub of the Ministry of Health), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas P. Zahn (i.a. CEO Data Science Institute and fib Research Institute of the BBW University), Ulrike Braeter (Managing Director – Department of Prevention of the health-economy-cluster Berlin-Brandenburg) and Paul Burggraf (CEO and CoFounder – Thrive). 

The DVG, championed by German Health Minister Jens Spahn and implemented in 2020, allows doctors to prescribe the use of technology like health tracking apps. Supporters say it represents a significant step towards bringing healthcare in sync with an increasingly digital world. But we’re still learning how this looks in practice and what it means for both patient privacy and patient outcomes.