On 14th and between 19th and 21st March, a hackfest – a developers forum dedicated to modern technologies used in medicine – was held at the premises of the DataArt company. The event was organised by Voronezh State University, Burdenko Voronezh State Medical University, and the DataArt company.
The organisers of the event wanted to create a platform for creativity, communication, exchange of ideas, goals and plans between IT and medical specialists, young researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students. There were no rules or boundaries for the developers’ creativity: mobile applications, help systems, reminder systems, paperflow software, applications for portable devices, etc. could be demonstrated at the hackfest.
On 14th March, students presented their ideas and met IT and medical experts. The participants had a chance to discuss medical technology trends both in Russia and abroad and consider IT solutions for solely medical problems. About 70 people took part in the first meeting, including almost 50 students of the Faculty of Computer Sciences and the Faculty of Applied Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of Voronezh State University. The first day concluded with 9 projects developed by teams of 2–5 people. On 19th and 20th March, the students tried to complete their projects and to write the code and on 21st March, they presented their results to the experts. All projects were very challenging and interesting.
The experts paid special attention to some medical projects that were developed from an idea into a finished application. Among such developments were “Constructing Gibbs-Rosebom composition triangles” and the social project “Communication tools for people with disabilities”.
‘Our goal was to bring together medical and IT specialists and create an atmosphere which would help them solve tasks at the intersection of medicine and IT. The participants offered a lot of interesting and challenging projects, for example the appointment system “I need to see the doctor”. A team of five people spent two weeks working on this challenging project. As for students, participation in the hackfest is, first of all, an opportunity to talk to experts and work with them in the same team and get feedback from them. The most amazing thing is that all the projects could easily be their graduation papers, and they completed them just in two days. It should be mentioned that Burdenko Voronezh State Medical University is interested in similar projects developed by our students. Some of the ideas are already being introduced,’ said one of the forum organisers, a lecturer at the Department of Digital Technologies of the Faculty of Computer Sciences of Voronezh State University Alexey Maximov.
