Over the weekend we were hacking the corona crisis

More than 500 people joined the global initiative to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic last weekend on April 3-5, 2020. During the 48-hour virtual event Hack the Crisis Slovakia, which is co-organized by CIVITTA consultants, dozens of solutions were developed addressing the current medical, social, and economic problems caused by the coronavirus. The four best solutions were awarded. Hack the Crisis Slovakia has been the biggest hackathon to date in Slovakia.

Over the weekend, the teams involved created a total of 23 projects aimed at mitigating the effects of the corona crisis. The jury evaluated several aspects; possible impact, sustainability, originality, work in progress, and the possibility of fast deployment into practice were the most essential ones.

Smart Triage was selected as the best solution from the hackathon. It is an App designed to replace admission questionnaires in hospitals for people suspected of having COVID-19 and thus reduce the risk of spreading the disease. The application enables the patient to fill in all the data using a smartphone before coming to the hospital. The admission medical staff would then simply scan the generated QR code and assess the risk of infection.

The jury also awarded two second-places to the Q-Tracker and Bear with Life projects.

Q-Tracker is a real-time monitoring and analytical tool for COVID-19 symptoms. It uses aggregated data on clinical symptoms of users to predict the number and location of infected people without the need of testing.

Bear with Life is an application designed to make the lives of people easier during the times of social distancing. It monitors how people feel and helps groups of users to maintain motivation and better manage social isolation.

The Audience Award went to the EmployWe project, which also received the Economy Award from the expert jury. It is an online platform where companies can share workers who are either idle or are currently needed.

However, the work on the solutions does not end with the final presentations. Two of the best solutions, Smart Triage and Q-Tracker, will participate in the international 6-week accelerator. Here, they can develop a prototype for their idea, gain an investor and a global reach.

More than 80 hackers in 23 teams, 60 mentors and experts participated in the event, which was prepared with the team of organizers literally in a few days. In an extremely short time, the individual teams came up with a number of solutions to the proposed challenges.

Slovaks living abroad, from the United States, the United Kingdom or Denmark, also joined the hackathon. Moreover, an international team with members from Slovakia, Brazil, and Lithuania also came up with a solution to one of the challenges, supporting the international reach of this event.

The event was held under the auspices of the President of the Slovak Republic Zuzana Čaputová.

The participants have worked on the challenges in four areas:

• Challenge no. 1: Help the healthcare
• Challenge no. 2: Help cities
• Challenge no. 3: Help the economy
• Challenge no. 4: Help the community

The Hack the Crisis Slovakia initiative is inspired by the idea of the Estonian startup platform Garage48. Similar hackathons have taken place in 46 countries around the world, and more countries are still joining.