Hackathon
Hackathon is a portmanteau of hacking and marathon. It is a limited time design competition for computer programming and software development. It is an exhilarating learning experience. We recently got an opportunity to be the part of such Hackathon organized by Aegon Life Insurance Company Sponsored by Amazon, Microsoft, TCS, Transamerica and Deloitte, the theme for which was “Health + wealth”. The idea was to focus on how we can help in improving the health of customers along with helping the company generate or retain revenue.
About Aegon Hackathon
Aegon Hackathon is an annual hackathon organized simultaneously in 3 places: Mumbai (India), Dallas (United States) and Budapest (Hungary). The prize money was 500 Euros for each member of the winning team and an investment award of 20,000 Euros in case they opt to develop the idea into a startup, prizes worth 200 euros for the first and second runner-ups.
Idea
Life of Pie
Mr Pie is a 30 year old Manager in a Multi National Corporation whose wakes up daily at 8, gets ready and has a quick breakfast. From 9 till 5 he is booked for calls, meetings, reviews that never seem to end. Most of the time he has to sit in his cubicle in front of a screen. Sometimes, he notices his increasing belly, his ever decreasing stamina but chooses to ignore all of them… at least for now. At 5 he gets up from his desk and hits the gym. During the workout he wonders how much physical activity is he really doing all day, how much time has he wasted in traffic, how much time does he sits idly on his desk. Questions like if he’s getting enough sleep, is he using too much social media pop all over his head but he brushes them aside to focus on his treadmill. He curses the technology, thinking that there is still no single, simple solution to his questions.
Mr Patel is an executive of one of the leading Life Insurance Corporations in India. His job: to analyze the risk profile of the customer while selling a new policy, that is, how much likely is the customer to claim the policy? He knows, as does everyone in the life insurance business that this likelihood of claim directly correlates to the health and lifestyle of the customer. Now he cannot just ask the customer about the same and hope he tells the truth. So his company also does which every other insurance company does, do a lot of physical tests to make a health profile and then make a decision to sell the policy or not and even decide the premium rate. Now these tests are a nuisance to the customer and many customers have to be rejected or their premiums increased whose health profiles are on the edge of the threshold of risk. They say that they are leading a healthier lifestyle now but Mr. Patel has no means to verify that. Also he often wishes if he could decrease the tests the customers have to face so as to make the customers’ experience better. While sitting at his desk he wonders how wonderful it would be if the company gets all the health and lifestyle data of its millions of customers and tries to make some sense out of it.
So what we proposed to help? A mobile application that will measure a lot of user health metrics including a list of places he has been through for the day, sleep time, number of steps taken, calories burnt, and time spent using various apps like social networking etc. From all this data we will make a health profile giving the user a Health score. The idea is to gather data from users and use Machine Learning to calculate accurate health scores and get insights on user behavior pattern so as to motivate the user to lead a healthier lifestyle by providing tips on how he/she can increase their overall fitness score.
Our idea also included a Chabot which could converse with the user to get insights on user’s mental status as well as motivating him and providing psychological health by giving tips. Based on the conversations we will also calculate the user’s mental score which will give an idea of the user’s mental health.
By focusing on both: Physical as well as mental fitness, we will be able to make more accurate predictions on user’s overall health as we believe that both these are interrelated and effect each other in significant manner.
The benefit for the company will be: they will be able to get a health profile of its policy holders as well as general data of the users and to give more accuracy about the decision to give a new policy. In this way: they can also provide instant health coverage to new customers and can also push the product to prospective customers directly via our platform.
We also designed a dashboard for the company where it can visualize and monitor the user’s data.
Snippets of Application
Company's Dashboard
Hackathon Events and Procedure
Over 1100 ideas were submitted from India alone out of which 12 ideas were shortlisted for the hackathon. In Mumbai, 24 hours (11am Thursday -11am Friday) were given to develop the Idea. Then there was an initial pitch for 15 minutes: 5 min for presentation and 10 minutes for Q/A. Here out of 12, only 6 were shortlisted for the final pitch. The final pitch was for 3 minutes of presentation followed by a Q/A Session. The initial pitch was private in a room whereas the final pitch was in the hall in public. The jury included: Shri. Ananth Krishnan (CTO, TCS), Mr. Vineet Arora (MD and CEO, Aegon Life), Mr. Tim K (CTO, Aegon Asia) etc. After the final pitch, 3 winners were selected, out of which our team stood 3rd.
Winning Moment