This weekend the 1st Arkathon Valais rewarded a project concerning a virtual mouse developed by Carlos Becker and Kenneth Funes, in partnership with the CRR.
Developing a game for children suffering from cystic fibrosis, creating an application in order to visualise the evolution of a wound in 3D, building an organ donors register, imagining a map of the entire health service in the Valais or detecting an alternative walking means with crutches: here are some of the projects on which researchers, designers and health care professionals have worked on.
The jury rewards the virtual computer mouse
In the end, it was the virtual mouse project which won the event's first prize, awarded by a jury made up of health care professionals, economists and academics. This mouse, which functions thanks to a Kinect, allows disabled people who cannot use a normal computer mouse to navigate around a computer screen by using head movements.
This project was developed in partnership with the Clinique romande de Réadaptation (Suva). It will be presented in detail during the next e-Health Day on the 11th of June in Sierre (www.theark.ch/e-health).
Most of the projects unrewarded by the jury continue their development with Arkathon Hacking Health Valais. This organisation contributes to improving the health system and patients' comfort.
What is Arkathon ?
It concerns a group of organised developers who have the objective of producing an applicable prototype within a few hours.
Creating, over a single weekend, IT solutions to facilitate health care professionals in their work: this was the goal of the first edition of ’Arkathon Valais, a new kind of event which took place from the 5th to the 7th of June in Sierre. The health care professionals placed their challenge and their problems online, the developers then worked on this project.
As the first in Switzerland, The Ark foundation organised an entire weekend dedicated to numeric health care. This event was inspired by hackathons, very popular across the Atlantic. They are in fact, events where researchers and developers get together to create collaborative computer programmes. The event is dedicated to e-health and took place at the TechnoArk in Sierre, in partnership with the Hacking Health network.
Find all the information concerning this event on http://www.theark.ch/fr/events/arkathon-hacking-health-valais-8048