The hackathon was delivered in response to Public Health England (PHE) data which shows that over a third of 10 and 11 year olds in the UK are overweight or obese. At the same time, PHE’s Sugar Smart App has received over two million downloads indicating an increasing public appetite for digital tools that can support healthy lifestyle choices.
By uniting software developers from across the university with like-minded individuals from tech companies across Northern England, PHE will use work developed at the hackathon to create a series of new digital products designed to help overweight children eat less and move more.
Alongside the 20 digital creatives that attended, clinicians and public health professionals were on-hand to answer questions and give advice on the feasibility of the teams’ ideas. Each team also met with the ‘code club’ pupils from nearby Menses Leigh School. The primary students were invited along to share their thoughts about the ideas in-development and to get involved in the creative process.
At the end of the two days each team presented their ideas in a timed 90 second ‘pitch’ in front of a panel of eight ‘judges’ that included TV doctor Xand van Tulleken, Boel Ferguson, Vice President at Disney Interactive UK and The University of Manchester’s Prof. Iain Buchan.
Prof Iain Buchan said: “I’m very excited that we have representatives from Manchester University taking part in this initiative from Public Health England. Great engineering was central to the rise of the public health movement over a hundred years ago. So it is great to see engineers, now of software, returning to tackle sticky public health problems such as obesity – helping to organise the efforts of a digital society in ways that might crowdsource better health for all.”
