On April 1, eight teams, comprised of both Georgia Tech and Emory University students, presented solutions to tackle mental health challenges and improve wellbeing, at the 2023 EGHI/GT Hackathon for Mental Health Technologies Hackathon.

 Emory Global Health Institute (EGHI) Director Dr. Rebecca Martin called the students “intelligent, sympathetic, and compassionate” for trying to bring about positive change in the space.

“This Hackathon is a very unique and distinct, experiential, entrepreneurial opportunity in the students’ education,” Martin said. “This opportunity and learning bring together students from different disciplines, from public health, from technology, engineering, law, basic humanities from sciences together, and allows them to ideate and develop products and technology prototypes or solutions to urgent real-time global health issues.”

IBM Partner Rashmi Gupta, Gimme Vending Co-Founder Cory Hewitt, Vice President for Infectious Diseases Program at the CDC Foundation Catherine Zilber, Senior Vice President of Technology at Innova Solutions Arvind Ramachandra, Senior Associate Director for the mental health program at the Carter Center Samhita Kumar judged the competition. After listening to team presentations, the judges asked questions and gave feedback. Once the judges deliberated, the following teams took home winning titles:  

1st Place: SensAI

An AI-based, socially interactable app that gamifies cognitive therapy for children with neuromotor disabilities

Team Members: Ysabelle Tristan, Vaibhav Mishra, Rachel Logue, Raksha Govind, Ishan Sheth      

2nd Place: Mindscope

A telehealth app built for providers that tracks patient data and metrics over time, session by session.

Team Members: Nyimul Hoque, Benson Ku, Charlie Jenkins, Microl Chen, Rahul Komatineni, Vanessa Wei

3rd Place: Doula

An app and clinician dashboard that will support maternal mental health and attempt to reduce incidence of peripartum depression and anxiety

Team Members: Ketki Vinayak Joshi, Anish Chandrashekar Biwalkar, Dhanish Revanth Rangaswamy Nandakumar, Niharika Ikkurthy, Christian Coletti, Binoy Shah     

Honorable Mention

Onward

An app for addiction recovery

Team Members: Giuliano Tissot, Maria del Pilar rubio Beltran, Mo Singhal, Vinicius Possobom, Daniel Leite, João Bonchristiano          

SpirituWell

An app for aiding Black faith-based groups/leaders’ access to mental health resources and information

Team Members: Gayathri Dhurjati, Preet Kaur, Trisha Minocha, Christina Kiruba Christopher, Gitika Chaudhry, Vibaa Raghunath          

In addition to a cash prize, the SensAI team earned a spot in CREATE-X’s GT Startup Launch program, which is designed to help students scale their business ideas.

Rahul Saxena, director of CREATE-X, said he hoped that the experience broadens what students believes is possible and wants to see all of them apply to GT Startup Launch.

“Over the past couple of weeks, these students, with their creativity and skills, have developed solid products addressing a real-world problem,” Saxena said. “It’s amazing to see what they've developed combining their respective disciplines.”

For those interested in participating in the next EGHI/GT hackathon, we plan to come back with another one in the fall. Stay tuned!