University students answer the Call for Code
Announcing the winner of The Call for Code Spot Challenge: Mental health in a time of crisis
In close collaboration with Anthem, Inc., Beacon Health Options, EMPOWER Collaborative, and XPRIZE, IBM kicked off The Call for Code Spot Challenge: Mental health in a time of crisis. In an effort to foster innovation in behavioral and mental health, the team was eager to provide a platform for university students to build transformative solutions addressing COVID-19.
After close evaluation by an esteemed panel of judges, comprised of some of the most accomplished and adept experts and leaders in the fields of healthcare, technology, and education, the winner has been announced:
Team UMUT from North Carolina State University was chosen as the winner of The Call for Code Spot Challenge: Mental health in a time of crisis. Their solution aims to assist the Hispanic population in the US, which the team described as a population that is disproportionately affected by COVID-19, especially in mental health issues. Leveraging various technologies, the team developed a decision support system consisting of two tools: (1) predictive tool and (2) Markov Decision Process (MDP) tool. The predictive tool forecasts the severity of depressive and anxiety disorder of the target user group by considering several predictors. The MDP tool assists the local agencies in making better-informed actions based on the severity level of anxiety and depressive disorders for the user group across the states. Learn more about the solution in the video below:
This spot challenge encouraged university students and researchers from the EMPOWER Collaborative to explore XPRIZE’s Data Collaborative or bring their own pre-approved data set to identify the impacts of COVID-19 on sociological and mental well-being in the community. With these insights, participants were tasked with developing scalable solutions that could help improve the psychological health across the country. Solutions could be prototypes or models focused on a variety of populations such as healthcare providers and frontline workers (e.g. nurses or physician burnout), patient experiences (e.g. isolation and recovery) or general civilian population (e.g. fear of public spaces; returning to work).
Over the course of the spot challenge, over 100 participants from across 12 universities leveraged IBM technologies and the network of over 35 mentors to build solutions in support of mental health in a time of crisis.
Coming in as runner-up, Team RINJANI, also from North Carolina State University, built a model to address suicide rates. The team built an approach for filling the information gap in mental health indicators, specifically suicide rates.
Also announced, teams Strive, Goodness of Fitts, and DeepHealth were recognized as spot challenge finalists — each team harnessing technology to address mental health in different ways.
These teams demonstrate the power of when talent meets technology to bring transformative ideas to life. As World Mental Health Day takes place tomorrow, it’s important to recognize problem solvers like these, who are building solutions to address some of the most pressing and topical issues of our time, to substantially improve the well-being of people around the world.
Want more Call for Code? Be sure to attend the 2020 Call for Code Awards on October 13 where you can learn the winner of the global challenge, and so much more!
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