- Winners of the first-ever event proposed a new app to tackle long wait times at Hong Kong public hospitals, hoping to improve patient quality of life
- Solely sponsored by The Hong Kong Jockey Club, the awards recognise the achievements of senior secondary school pupils in their academic and community endeavours
The Student of the Year Hackathon was an exclusive event for the winners and alumni of the SOTY awards. Photo: Handout
Before you read:
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The Student of the Year Awards is an annual event that celebrates senior secondary school student’s academic achievements and community contributions
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The Hackathon is a new initiative under SOTY that aims to provide an opportunity for alumni to leverage digital solutions to real-world problems
Think about it:
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If you could brainstorm a digital solution to solve one real-world problem, what would it be, and how could you achieve it?
With the best interest of patients in mind, two University of Hong Kong (HKU) students teamed up to brainstorm ideas for a new app to tackle long wait times at public hospitals.
Hewitt Wong Lik-hang and Elison Lee Po-wa presented the idea for OnCallLogist, a symptom logger for cancer patients, to a panel of judges.
Drawing from their own experiences, the team hopes their app can tackle the long waiting times at public hospitals, which often result in rushed examinations during appointments and a lack of proper symptom management until it worsens.
“As biomedical sciences and medical students, we are both devoted to finding solutions that can help improve the quality of life of patients,” said the duo, both first-year students at HKU medical school. Wong Lik-hang also won the 2022/23 SOTY Best Devotion to School award.
Their proposal won them first place under a new initiative from the Student of the Year Awards, called SOTY Hackathon, held for the first time this year to draw awareness to real-life issues and maximise potential social impact.
The event, held at the South China Morning Post office last Saturday, was exclusively for winners and alumni of the SOTY awards. It brought together 30 alums to form teams and develop digital solutions for real-world problems.
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The champion team was awarded a cash prize of HK$5,000, while the first runner-up and second runner-up received cash prizes of HK$3,000 and HK$2,000, respectively.
“This event is dedicated to nurturing alumni by providing them with real-life problems to solve and inspiring leaders with new perspectives and innovative solutions from the young talents,” said Katherine Cheung, director of student business at SCMP.
The participants were divided into six teams and given two weeks to develop a 10-minute presentation. Their task was to create a digital solution within a budget of HK$1 million for one of six topics: positive ageing and elderly care, youth development and poverty alleviation, health community, talent and sector development, and sports and culture.
“We received feedback from the judges regarding practicality and details on the business model ... Most importantly, we had a deep discussion on how to encourage cancer patients to use our application and further expand this to other illnesses,” the winning team said after the event.
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Judges included Irene Chan, head of public affairs at The Hong Kong Jockey Club; Ang Jin, chief growth officer at SCMP; Albert Wong, chief executive officer of Hong Kong Science and Technology Park; and Benjamin Au Yeung, Chinese linguist.
Winning second place was the team led by Gao Hong-ye, the first runner-up of the SOTY 2022/23 grand prize.
The five-person team proposed a smart digital platform that leverages recommendations by artificial intelligence (AI) to bridge the information gap faced by families with special educational needs (SEN) students and address the lack of human resources for NGOs that help them. It’s a topic near to their hearts, as members of the team have worked with these types of organisations since 2019.
“We realised that these [problems] could be easily solved by the introduction of cutting-edge AI technologies and matchmaking algorithms. Hence, we resolved to implement our idea to target the systemic problems in the SEN support system,” explained the team.
Taking part in the Hackathon strengthened the team’s interest in innovation and social engagement.
“We hope the Hackathon could be our first step towards implementing our solution on a societal basis. We look forward to the future potential of our project and wish to actualise our vision, serving the SEN and wider community in Hong Kong.”
Third place went to the team led by Karndeep Singh, the winner of the SOTY 2021/22 Best Devotion to School award.
Comprising three members, the team developed a digital platform called Explore Hong Kong to promote the city’s traditional culture.
“As ethnic minorities, we do not quite understand or can apply traditional culture into our lives, mainly due to us coming from different places, and we are often only exposed to our ethnic cultural backgrounds,” said the students.
“We felt that what was missing was a route or method to solve the issue. [So] we personalised our thoughts and wishes and put them as products … we were thrilled to hear that our approach was seen as one of the more practical approaches to tackle the issue.”
Solely sponsored by The Hong Kong Jockey Club, the SOTY awards aim to recognise the outstanding achievements of senior secondary school pupils in both their academic and community endeavours.