Project HealthDesign Developer Challenge

Challenge Background

In its first round, from 2006 to 2008, Project HealthDesign supported nine teams to design and build prototype applications that could be run on top of personal health data. We now seek designers and innovators to translate one of these nine prototypes into working applications that run on smartphones, tablets or web platforms.

Challenge Description

A key tenet of Project HealthDesign is the separation of the service used to maintain the data in someone’s personal health record (PHR) from the many apps that could be used to collect, display, analyze or otherwise turn that data into actions that would lead to better health. The nine teams were instructed to employ user-centered design techniques to design applications that would be useful to their target population, rather than to expend effort creating the underlying data services. Since the program began, a number of commercial PHR data services – most famously HealthVault and Google Health – offering data storage and development APIs have emerged.

Short videos illustrate the teams’ designs that envisioned apps supporting such health challenges as children needing to take regular medications, seniors transitioning back home after hospital care, sedentary adults, women undergoing breast cancer care, young adults with chronic conditions like hemophilia, and people with diabetes, chronic heart disease, or chronic pain. Each video shows multiple features and functions of an overall approach to helping people with an information challenge related to their health.

Evaluation Criteria

For this challenge, we are asking developers to build apps for the web, smartphones or tablets, that:

  • realize any aspects of the applications shown in the videos; and
  • are built to run on a commercially available PHR service that can securely store the data. (Project HealthDesign’s Common Platform, an open source set of components designed to provide some back-end PHR services, is not a commercial service but can also be used if the developer builds it into a commercial service.)

For example, the My-Medi-Health project designed a system that draws on a medication list and dosing instructions to set up a medication schedule that drives reminders and alerts of missed medications on a smartphone. Building on the deisgn documents and source code produced by this project, a potential team could develop an application that utilizes a commercial service like Google Health or HealthVault and smartphone platforms like iOS or Android to make a working system that would provide the functionality shown in the video.

Entries will be judged on design quality and the degree of function that they provide. Additional consideration will be give to applications that can demonstrate robustness and functionality with at least 10 sample cases.

Terms & Conditions

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