NewWave Code-A-Thon

Feb 9, 2017

Elkridge, MD – On February 4-5, 2017 NewWave hosted its first-ever 24-hour Code-A-Thon bringing together and inspiring teams of students, budding entrepreneurs, and healthcare professionals to collaborate while exploring innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Each team’s goal was to create an application using virtual and augmented reality to eventually be deployed on Microsoft’s HoloLens.

NewWave’s CSR Department championed the event alongside TipHub, an investment manager and innovation foundry for startups in Africa and the African Diaspora to foster collaboration and socially-responsible technological solutions.

Patrick Munis, NewWave’s CEO, and Gregory Harris, NewWave’s CTO, kicked off the event by welcoming coders, answering questions, and sharing insight. Special Code-A-Thon guests included virtual reality expert, Damon Hernandez, a 3D Web & Immersive Tech Dev & Designer, and NewWave’s very own Cathy Mueller, Director of Health Informatics and former Registered Nurse to provide healthcare guidance to coders in their ideation stages of application development. Over the course of the 24 hours filled with nonstop coding, red bull, and pizza, two teams designed remarkable applications using Unity.

On Sunday after the 12:00 PM coding deadline, two teams prepared to show off their applications to NewWave’s eager audience and judging panel. The first team, pARmedic, used virtual and augmented reality to showcase and prevent diagnosis error in healthcare. The second team, Vital Visuals, linked the Xbox Kinect to the Microsoft HoloLens, creating an augmented and virtual reality-themed metrics application for capturing measurements and range of motion.

Both teams presented innovative uses for virtual and augmented reality, impressing the panel of judges. Team Vital Visual’s solution of a metric based application was chosen as the most innovative model and selected as the overall winner.

In his closing remarks, Patrick Munis congratulated both teams on putting in their best work and shared that NewWave looks forward to hosting many more Code-A-Thons in the future.

Congratulations team Vital Visual on a job well done!