More than 300 prototypes and applications to help solve Smart Nation challenges were developed during the Hackathon@SG and the co-located MIT Hacking Medicine@SG (HackMed).
Held in Singapore for the first time, the event saw a massive turnout of over 1,100 participants from all walks of life such as healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, programmers, designers, and students.
Some examples of solutions included ingestible robots to improve health, a GPS-based pricing system to regulate commercial drone activities and even a smart living solution that focuses on entertainment and remotely controls devices at home.
Organized by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore and IT Standards Committee, and supported by the Ministry of Finance and SPRING Singapore, Hackathon@SG offered a plethora of technology for participants to develop their applications with. These included more than 11,000 datasets and APIs via data.gov.sg; Internet of Things technologies, virtual reality technologies and cloud technologies.
The hackathon also saw the largest gathering of ministries and agencies working hand-in-hand, with 18 in total contributing to both Hackathon@SG and HackMed. Held in Singapore for the first time, the prestigious HackMed hackathon attracted healthcare professionals including trained doctors to tackle healthcare challenges such as helping citizens to age-in-place.
“The overwhelming response to Hackathon@SG has shown that there is no shortage of passionate working adults, students and kids in Singapore who can create applications to benefit society and build our Smart Nation. Using IoT and open data, we have seen an increasingly higher quality of solutions every year to tackle issues such as aging and transport. We hope to build a vibrant community that includes developers, businesses and venture capitalists who can work together to bring these innovative apps to the next level and build the next big thing for Singapore technology,” said Jacqueline Poh, Managing Director of IDA.
Goji, the team behind the winning data visualization tool from the Open category walked away with a cash prize of $9,000 while Team Excellence who developed a program accelerometer that helps track exercise sets received $3,000 per team member for the Student category.
The winning team from Balestier Hill primary School received Dot & Dash Wonder Packs and Sphero 2.0 for their Scratch story dubbed “Plasmatic Force” in the Junior category (for pupils under 12 years old). Team Caregiver and Complain King received the top prize of $9,000 at Hackmed and $3,000 at the satellite Hackathon@SG in San Francisco, respectively.
Several teams including Team Minions, Hacker Hunters, and BFM Digital, received special recognition awards for the best use of open data, security configuration, User Experience Design and business plan, among others.
Launched in April 2015 by Dr. Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for Communications and Information, Hackathon@SG ensured teams were well prepared, with 15 pre-hackathon workshops to help them better understand the challenge statements, get familiar with government data, use software, and hardware tools and apply standards in IoT technologies.