Hackathon Diaries: Oulu 5GFWD hackathon
Virtual classrooms, hospital experiences, and factories of tomorrow
How to hack with 5G networks in mind? How do you manage three teams and ten hackers in an efficient manner? Is Oulu one of the best places to hold a hackathon?
The role of technology
When 3G networks came, they brought us our first real chance in mobile internet and mobile video calls, among other things. Now it’s time to add another odd number in front of the letter G and, like before, supercharge the speed of the network. But what kind of world-changing solutions will this new 5G network bring? It seems that no one knows yet, but there’s a lot of potential!
Network technologies aren’t really my jam, but I see 5G networks — like any other cutting-edge technology — as an enabler. This hackathon provided a new kind of challenge that we were eager to take on. A well-defined problem and a polished solution wouldn’t cut it this time — we would also need to take into consideration what role this specific technology plays in all three solutions.
How did we do? Short answer: 1 win and 2 honorary mentions.
The challenges we took up
In total, there were three challenges, two from industry leaders Nokia and Telia, and one from the Oulu University Hospital. Here is a quick rundown of those challenges.
Oulu University Hospital (OYS) challenged teams to improve their customers’ journey. With 42 kilometers of corridors, the hospital is a massive complex, and navigating through different departments takes ages. Additionally, all patients are given the same information in the same format, which is confusing to some patients. Since OYS is a special health care hospital, patients have no say when it comes to scheduling, leading to late or missed appointments, which is very inefficient.
Nokia wanted participants to develop new ways of optimizing their already state-of-the-art telecom network equipment. To succeed, the hackers would need to make the current process even more digital than it currently is by utilizing machine learning, computer vision, wearable technology, augmented and virtual reality, and robotics. Nokia’s industrial environment challenges allowed our team to try building with novel technologies.
Telia presented a challenge with the largest scope — mobile apps for the 5G age. Unlike Nokia’s and OYS’s challenges, there was no apparent real-world problem. This meant that to create a truly useful solution, our team would need to find a target group whose needs are not yet met by any other solution. We eventually selected students and educators as our target group and included a teacher student as one of our hackers to gain valuable insights.
How we worked
Perfektio set out to solve all three challenges with three separate teams. Our participant size was ten hackers, eight of whom were Perfektio employees and two guest additions (one a teacher!). Even with the guest additions, our established hackathon workflow proved effective, enabling us to leverage collective expertise into amazing concepts.
We don’t make strict rules on which hacker works in which team but instead opt to keep the teams and their members in a constantly fluctuating state and keep everyone updated on what is happening in each team. This allows us to allocate hackers based on every team’s need at the moment. In Oulu, this worked fantastically. For example, in the case of OYS, our primary team consisted of only two hackers but leveraged the collective input.
Before the hackathon, we keep the concepts fairly undefined because we don’t want to go into hackathons with ideas we can’t part ways with. This has been our approach for a long time. For the same reason, we start the first day of the hackathon by bombarding company representatives with questions. We then combine this with the knowledge of potential users we have gathered before or during the hackathon. Why? Because you can only solve problems if you understand them.
The teams and their solutions
Perfekt Patient set out to create the best customer journey ever seen in a hospital. A week before the hackathon, we reached out to doctors and people who had spent long times in hospitals. From these interviews and conversations with OYS representatives, we defined our problem space, focusing on guiding patients to the right place at the right time. Our solution was a mobile application coded with React Native. OYS appreciated our solution and awarded us an honorable mention.
Industry Perfekt made an impressive demo and development plan for Nokia to optimize their component tracking process. With wearable technology and always-on optical reading, the tracking process would become much less prone to errors. Although we didn’t win the main prize, we received an honorary mention, which is always nice.
Team Classroom created a dashboard for teachers that provided insights into students' engagement and included a VR demo of a heart for students. This solution enabled students to immerse more in teaching while giving teachers valuable insights into student learning. Telia loved our demo and awarded us the 10K main prize for it!
Oulu 5G hackathon was a truly positive experience. The venue and event were masterfully organized, and just look at how much fun we had! Big thanks to Nokia, Telia, and OYS for the challenging projects, which were some of the toughest in our hackathon history — and that’s a good thing!