Helpvoice!, Hospital Morbidity Survey and RIAN win the IV Aporta Challenge

The IV edition of the Aporta Challenge, whose motto has revolved around 'The value of data for health and well-being of citizens', has already announced its three winners. The competition, promoted by Red.es in collaboration with the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, launched in November 2021 with an ideas competition and continued earlier this summer with a selection of ten finalist proposals.

As in the three previous editions, the selected candidates had a three month period to transform their ideas into a prototype, which they presented in person at the final gala.

In a post-pandemic context, where health plays an increasingly important role, the theme of the competition sought to identify, recognise and reward ideas aimed at improving the efficiency of this sector with solutions based on the use of open data.

On 18 October, the ten finalists came to the Red.es headquarters to present their proposals to a jury made up of representatives from public administrations, organisations linked to the digital economy, universities and data communities. In just twelve minutes, they had to summarise the purpose of the proposed project or service, explain how the development process had been carried out, what data they had used, and dwell on aspects such as the economic viability or traceability of the project or service.

Ten innovative projects to improve the health sector

The ten proposals presented to the jury showed a high level of innovation, creativity, rigour and public vocation. They were also able to demonstrate that it is possible to improve the quality of life of citizens by creating initiatives that monitor air quality, build solutions to climate change or provide a quicker response to a sudden health problem, among other examples.

For all these reasons, it is not surprising that the jury had a difficult time choosing the three winners of this fourth edition. In the end, HelpVoice initiative won the first prize of €5,000, the Hospital Morbidity Survey won the €4,000 linked to second place and RIAN, the Intelligent Activity and Nutrition Recommender, closed the ranking with third place and €3,000 as an award.

First prize: HelpVoice!

• Team: Data Express, composed of Sandra García, Antonio Ríos and Alberto Berenguer.

HelpVoice! is a service that helps our elderly through voice recognition techniques based on automatic learning. Thus, in an emergency situation, the user only need to click on a device that can be an emergency button, a mobile phone or home automation tools and tell about their symptoms. The system will send a report with the transcript and predictions to the nearest hospital, speeding up the response of the healthcare workers.

In parallel, HelpVoice! will also recommend to the patient what to do while waiting for the emergency services. Regarding the use of data, the Data Express team has used open information such as the map of hospitals in Spain and uses speech and sentiment recognition data in text.

Second prize: The Hospital Morbidity Survey

• Team: Marc Coca Moreno

This is a web environment based on MERN, Python and Pentaho tools for the analysis and interactive visualisation of the Hospital Morbidity Survey microdata. The entire project has been developed with open source and free tools and both the code and the final product will be openly accessible.

To be precise, it offers 3 main analyses with the aim of improving health planning:

• Descriptive: hospital discharge counts and time series.
• KPIs: standardised rates and indicators for comparison and benchmarking of provinces and communities.
• Flows: count and analysis of discharges from a hospital region and patient origin.

All data can be filtered according to the variables of the dataset (age, sex, diagnoses, circumstance of admission and discharge, etc.).

In this case, in addition to the microdata from the INE Hospital Morbidity Survey, statistics from the Continuous Register (also from the INE), data from the ICD10 diagnosis catalogues of the Ministry of Health and from the catalogues and indicators of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and of the Autonomous Communities, such as Catalonia: catalogues and stratification tools, have also been integrated.

You can see the result of this work here.

Third prize: RIAN - Intelligent Activity and Nutrition Recommender

• Team: RIAN Open Data Team, composed of Jesús Noguera y Raúl Micharet..

This project was created to promote healthy habits and combat overweight, obesity, sedentary lifestyles and poor nutrition among children and adolescents. It is an application designed for mobile devices that uses gamification techniques, as well as augmented reality and artificial intelligence algorithms to make recommendations.

Users have to solve personalised challenges, individually or collectively, linked to nutritional aspects and physical activities, such as gymkhanas or games in public green spaces.

In relation to the use of open data, the pilot uses data related to green areas, points of interest, greenways, activities and events belonging to the cities of Malaga, Madrid, Zaragoza and Barcelona. In addition, these data are combined with nutritional recommendations (food data and nutritional values and branded food products) and data for food recognition by images from Tensorflow or Kaggle, among others.

Alberto Martínez Lacambra, Director General of Red.es presents the awards and announces a new edition

The three winners were announced by Alberto Martínez Lacambra, Director General of Red.es, at a ceremony held at Red.es headquarters on 27 October. The event was attended by several members of the jury, who were able to talk to the three winning teams.

Martínez Lacambra also announced that Red.es is already working to shape the V Aporta Challenge, which will focus on the value of data for the improvement of the common good, justice, equality and equity.

Once again this year, the Aporta Initiative would like to congratulate the three winners, as well as to thank the work and talent of all the participants who decided to invest their time and knowledge in thinking and developing proposals for the fourth edition of the Aporta Challenge.