Hacking a Public Health Crisis: Gun Violence.
During the Gun Violence Prevention Challenge Summit & Hack-a-thon, the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) employed a public health approach to gun violence prevention by generating innovations that can address gun safety, mental health, community resilience, and policy.
Based at Massachusetts General Hospital, CAMTech is a global network of academic, clinical, corporate, government and non-profit partners working together to drive health innovation around the world. CAMTech’s core methodology identifies pressing clinical and public health needs from the field, crowdsources innovative solutions, and accelerates the idea from idea to patient impact. Through its “co-creation” model, CAMTech enables collaborations across experts in health, engineering, design, and business to develop technologies that are not only user-centric, technologically-disruptive and socially-impactful, but also commercially viable.
The Challenge Summit convened clinicians, government representatives, public health experts, and affected community members to facilitate a discussion of challenges and provide critical insight into gun violence prevention. The Hack-a-thon served as an open-innovation platform for a diverse community to co-create innovations over a 48-hour period. Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, mentorship, and award incentives, teams can accelerate ideas into breakthrough innovations with the potential to curb the epidemic of gun violence and improve the lives of survivors. Through its “co-creation” model, CAMTech convened experts in health, engineering, and business to increase awareness and generate solutions to improve gun violence prevention. Innovators developed technologies that are not only user-centric, technologically-disruptive and socially-impactful but also commercially viable. Working together, there is the power to effect real change and save lives.
In order for the Gun Violence Prevention weekend to be a success, several student volunteers from SPH helped register participants, set up chairs/tables/materials, clean up, manage the Hack Store, take notes, keep times for pitches, and even lend important insights and assistance to the Hack-a-thon teams. Several volunteers took advantage of this flexibility and joined teams. Aside from volunteering, it was a great networking event as a variety of stakeholders from Boston city government, Mass General Hospital, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, BU, and others were in attendance.
After a long, but inspiring weekend, three winners were selected:
Tech Innovation Award ($1,000): Team Sobriety Control Gun (SCG) – an alcohol-sensing firearm locking device that uses a breathalyzer and combination lock to replace the existing cable lock.
Communications Strategy Award ($1,000): Team Good Guys with a Gun – an app-based educational tool that trains gun owners about safe firearm storage.
Community Resilience Award ($1,000): Team Dream Alive – an online platform that links families and individuals affected by gun violence to mentors and social services.
But the story doesn’t end here.
All 10 teams were invited to continue working on their innovations and attend a Demo Day during which they had the opportunity to compete for the $10K grand prize and six months of acceleration support through the CAMTech Accelerator Program (CAP). Four teams presented to a multidisciplinary panel of judges, including Brian Rosnov of Philips HealthWorks, Ela Ben-Ur of Olin College of Engineering and Dr. Ryan Carroll of Mass General Hospital, taking them step-by-step through the conception, innovation and future business plan for their projects. It was inspiring to see how far each project had come in just two months. While each innovation focused on a critical element of gun violence, in the end, only one was deemed the winner. Team Good Guy With A Gun, the winner of the $1,000 Communication Strategy Award, was selected for innovating an app-based education tool that trains gun owners about what it truly means to be a “good guy with a gun” including safe firearm storage and de-escalation in mass-shooting scenarios.
Congratulations to all the participants.