How healthy are college students?
It’s a topic that medical researchers know relatively little about. With support from Columbia’s Data Science Institute, researchers Noémie Elhadad and Itsik Pe’er came up with the idea to crowdsource an app to track student health. They launched the Lion’s Tracks design challenge last spring to see what Columbia students could develop.https://www.youtube.com/embed/KWS8_IfEuHA
The app had to be able to collect real-time personal data as easily as existing fitness tracking apps like FitBit and Strava. But it also had to be able to hide participants’ identities and feed back enough information to keep them engaged and willing to stick with the experiment.
In May, five teams demoed their apps. Thre professors–Pe’er, a computer scientist at Columbia Engineering, and Elhadad and Lena Mamykina, both researchers in biomedical informatics at Columbia University Medical Center–judged the competition, weighing the pros and cons of each submission.
In the end, the judges awarded the $2,000 prize to a pair of computer science majors – Joshua Zweig and Shiv Sakuja — then in their first year at Columbia. Now in the final stage of development, the app is expected to go live sometime in 2016.