NHS Hackathon

I've just had an awesome weekend of awesome. Honourable mention in the NHS hackday, won a t-shirt and surgical book, and was a far cooler bank holiday weekend than...for instance...playing in the sun. I met lots of awesome people, and if anyone wants to see the presentation it is here over at google docs

And a video of it (skip to 11:45)

We were an honourable mention (the first honourable mention, which I count as runner up ;) and I have a team photo (as well as other photos of the day) here.
 
(Edit - I'm putting in here a better discription of what we did - apologies, I've spent too long staring at medical textbooks and not long enough writing creatively)

Hackathons are a day where all manner of people (programmers, business managers, mathematicians etc) get together to discuss problems and find solutions. In this case, I got attached to a group of programmers who were looking for possible uses of a Leap Motion device  (https://www.leapmotion.com/). The device uses infra red to detect the position of the palm of the hand and all five fingers and records the position.

Working with the team over the weekend, we discovered how it could be used to measure tremors in the hand. Amongst the possibilities this opens, it can be used to objectively record a patient's progression over time, whether it is monitoring a disease such as Parkinsons, assessing the effect of medication or rehabilitative physiotherapy. So far as I am aware, there is no clinical objective measure on the severity of tremor, there only seems to be approximations based on quality of life measures.

The possibilities of what we created seem colossal, and I was excitedly talking to other clinicians about how neurological diseases could be monitored, and how GPs, on seeing a new patient can exactly track the extent of a disease, or when transferring patients around a hospital, a doctor can look at a graph and see instantly the extent of a patient's tremor.

It opens possibilities for further subdividing tremors which currently consist of "does it interfere with a patient's life or not", and (excitingly) it may uncover new types of tremor to subdivide existing disease classifications, discover new syndromes, and find ways to assess the early onset of conditions.