Electronic Medical Records Wearable Wins First OpenStack App Hackathon in Latin America

20 teams of students, government workers and developers competed in Guadalajara, Mexico, for a chance to showcase their app at the OpenStack Summit Barcelona

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GUADALAJARA, Mexico // September 12, 2016 — An application designed to make medical records immediately available to first responders and doctors via the cloud, smartphones and wearables took top honors at Guadalajara’s first OpenStack Hackathon over the weekend. Four members of the Sensemaya team will fly to the next OpenStack Summit, happening in Barcelona, Spain, October 25-28, to showcase their winning concept. More than 100 developers as well as 20 mentors, five judges, and many other organizers and onlookers gathered for three days at the Tecnologico de Monterrey Campus in Guadalajara, Mexico, to test their application development skills on OpenStack, the open source cloud platform.

Sensemaya sought to tackle a problem they call the “golden hour,” the period of time critical to rendering medical aid in emergency situations. Their application allows people to take ownership of their medical records and make them readily available to different doctors and first responders, so they can render better medical care. The team of four university students and tech workers designed a platform in which smartphones and low-cost wearable devices are tied to medical records in the cloud, giving caregivers access using Bluetooth and near-field communication (NFC). They used the OpenStack Nova, Neutron, Keystone, Swift and Shade services for the application, along with Node.js, MongoDB, Java and Angular.

“It’s inspiring to see developers all over the world focus on using technology to have a social impact by improving health and safety, government efficacy, cost of living and emergency preparedness,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “The innovative concepts these teams developed highlight what is possible with open source software and the cloud. We are thrilled with the participation and with the support the event has received from academia, industry and the local OpenStack community here in Guadalajara."

During the three-day event, teams of three to six participants were challenged to use OpenStack and its APIs to develop the best cloud app in 40 hours. In addition to Sensemaya, four other finalists were recognized by the judges:

• Los Momos, who developed the 'Trust Me’ platform for peer-to-peer lending at low interest rates, taking into account credit scores and community ratings.
• Stack This, who developed the 'Hunter Price’ mobile app for price comparison shopping between different retail stores and online, as well as a component to encourage charity donation based on organizations’ current needs.
• Mezcal Tech, who developed a platform to immediately report crimes using panic buttons throughout the city, so first responders can more quickly render aid and police can have more insight on where to proactively patrol based on analyzing aggregate data.
• Cucea, which designed Si-Blla using QR codes and specially designed flashcards to help visually impaired people learn new languages.

Held September 9-11, the Hackathon was organized by local OpenStack community members and sponsored by Intel, Red Hat, Tecnologico de Monterrey Campus GDL and many other supporting organizations. The Hackathon provided cloud resources, mentors and training to help developers learn how to create distributed applications that scale for the cloud.

"It was very exciting to have so many passionate app developers gathered in Guadalajara for this OpenStack Hackathon, some of which traveled across Mexico to attend and even camped at the University,” said Victor Diaz, one of the key event organizers and Engineering Manager at Intel. “With these world class events we support the Latin American cloud computing talent, as well as make a social impact using technology to implement solutions for the problems they face in life everyday."

The global OpenStack community has more than 50,000 members and thousands of organizations around the world. Latin America is an emerging market for OpenStack, with several large users including with MercadoLibre, a large eCommerce site based in Argentina; Dualtec, a service provider in Brazil; the Office of the President of Mexico; and several financial service institutions.

About OpenStack®
OpenStack® is the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds. In use globally at large and small enterprises, telecoms, service providers, and government/research organizations, OpenStack is a technology integration engine that supports the diverse ecosystem of cloud computing innovation. Current news and alerts signup at: http://www.openstack.org/news/signup.

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Media Contacts:

Robert Cathey
Cathey Communications for the OpenStack Foundation
m 865-386-6118
e [email protected]

Lauren Sell
OpenStack Foundation
e [email protected]

http://hackathon.openstackgdl.org/