Makpar’s Innovation Engineer Wins at Hackathon
Peter Cofrancesco
We are excited to announce that in the recent Fall Hackathon, hosted by our partner TISTA, Makpar’s Peter Cofrancesco, Innovation Engineer, came in 2nd place out of 9 teams. He was on a team with our TISTA. The purpose of the hackathon was to innovate solutions to problems the competitors had a passion for. After being provided several themes, Alpha Team Awesome chose to work on: Finding a Solution for Under-Served-Population Using Emerging Technologies.
They focused in on the diabetes community, where the methodology for tracking caloric and macronutrient intake is quite outdated. They came up with the solution of a phone app that would provide fully integrated personalized lifestyle tracking. They created the app to include a custom image classifier that increases ease of keeping a food diary.
As a first step, a user could take a picture of their meal and the image classifier provides top five guesses of the recipe for that meal. The user would then select which recipe best fit that meal and a database would return the nutritional information. This information would then be stored in a food diary with time stamps. The user could also input their own recipes with several images, which would train the machine to re-learn based on usage. In addition, users are encouraged to input their exercise log, which would then be included in the predictive analytics algorithm, along with the food diary and blood glucose measurements, to help more accurately track and manage their weight.
In the next step, users upload their glucose readings obtained from their blood glucose meter. Then the application would use predictive analytics to compare spikes and dips in blood sugar with their food and exercise diary. That way a diabetic could identify problem foods, important times to snack, and how they should time eating before exercise for optimized individual results and safety. After enough individual readings, Peter is planning to incorporate recommended insulin dosage and timing in future developmental phases.
Each winning team member has committed to donating the prize money to a charity of their choice. Peter is donating his share to Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Overall, this app would hopefully encourage incremental lifestyle changes for a better quality of life. We’re very proud of Peter and the team for their hard work and top placement in the contest!