Our next Scithon: Fixing problems in healthcare

Let’s face it: changing lifestyles is hard. Major lifestyle diseases, including adulthood diabetes and heart disease, take way too many lives each year. The problem is not the lack of information in healthcare, but fragmentation and poor implementation of information.

When we first sat down a couple of months ago with Skhole Oy and the Nursing Research Foundation, we quickly came to realize the breadth of opportunity for collaboration to address the massive data challenge in healthcare, including the one mentioned above.

The mission of the Nursing Research Foundation is to promote the effectiveness of nursing by developing evidence-based guidelines. To ensure that the most relevant knowledge is the core of those guidelines, the Foundation’s researchers spend thousands of hours skimming through research articles each year with tight deadlines. The sheer volume of papers published every single day makes it a tough task, one that our human brains are not optimized for.

The good news is that the artificial brain of the learning machines are. The Iris.AI tool is built to automate the drudgery part of the research process including surfacing articles, finding structure in that data, and providing human experts with the key findings. And the benefit of all that? Well, researchers and students can focus on understanding the most important contents instead of spending hundreds of hours searching for them.

Jumping back to the initial question of impacting lifestyles, we are excited to announce our next Scithon to be held in collaboration with the Nursing Research Foundation, Skhole Oy and the Lapland University of Applied Science. The goal of the 12-hour research sprint is to identify the most effective interventions implemented to sustain healthy lifestyle in health-care. Iris.AI will be one of the tools made available to the teams of students and researchers tasked to map out the relevant research content in 12 hours.

We are currently looking for participants with a curious mind from across research disciplines to participate the sprint. Cash prizes of 3000€, 1000€ and 1000€ will be awarded at end of the day to the TOP 3 teams selected by the Scithon jury.

Interested in joining the event?

Check out further details and apply with your team or individually by March 8th!