Humber Care Tech Challenge Day 2

The winners being surprised by fireworks…

The second day of the competition was at least as much fun as the first. We actually got to spend some time getting some code to work. By the end we had some sensors sort of working and Amazon Echo behaviours that responded to commands for our application. And we also had a good plan for developing and deploying the application. We still didn’t win though. Mainly because the winning solution (and, to be honest, quite a few of the other 12 entrants) was quite a lot better than ours.

The winner, which started with the idea of giving everyone in a care home their own Amazon Alexa device, moved on to develop this in lots of interesting ways, and ended up with a fully working demonstration application, was just wonderful. It was chosen as the best by both the judges and the “People’s Choice Award” which was marked by all the teams present.

Thanks so much to the councils and healthcare organisations that put the event together. It was a wonderful occasion and I hope that it will be repeated some time in the future. I also really look forward to seeing some of the ideas that were presented going forward to do good.

One of the most impressive things to me about the whole competition has been the commitment of everyone involved to get the ideas into action. I’m really looking forward to seeing this happen.