Health 2.0 / MAKE Developer Challenge happening this weekend in Boston

by Andrew Odewahn | Comment | 16 February 2011

The Health 2.0 / MAKE Developer Challenge is happening this weekend, Feb 19th, in Boston. The day is bringing developers, designers, makers, researchers, care providers, sensor-geeks, hardware hackers, patients, and anyone else interested in improving healthcare by building new applications and tools. If you haven't signed up already, register now, because it's filling up fast.

Here's a sample of a few of the speakers that will be on hand:

Vaibhav Bhandari from Microsoft's Health Solutions Group. Vaibhav is going to be talking about HealthVault, medical ontologies, and untangling the various HealthCare IT standards.
John Brownstein from Harvard Children's Hospital. John is an epidemiologist who has studied diseases as varied as malaria, dengue, HIV, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, RSV and influenza. He's going to be speaking about his work with HealthMap, a site that brings together a variety of data to provide a comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.
Greg Borenstein from NYU's ITP school. He's going to be talking about how to hack the Kinect using Processing and Open Frameworks, and how it can be applied to health.
John Luciani from Wiblock. John is going to be walking through how to use the various goodies MAKE is supplying for the event: arduinos, sensor, modules, and so forth. He's also got some code demos teams can use for their projects.
Far McKon from Bug Labs. Far is bringing some really cool gear -- 5 complete bug bundles. The heart of the kit it is the 'Bug Base' which has built in wifi, bluetooth, and battery. Each kit has a general IO module (the Von Hippel), GPS, and a camera + accelerometer module. And sample code to use all of them, naturally.

Huge thanks to the MAKE team (particularly Dan Woods at the Maker Shed), Microsoft, and Bug Labs for their support for the event.

As a teaser, check out Greg's demonstration code that uses OSCeleton Processing MotionCapture3D to convert data from the Kinect into 3D coordinates representing each of the joints of the body.

Kinect and OSCeleton controlling a camera in 3D space in Processing from Greg Borenstein on Vimeo.

He's written the project up on Skeleton Tracking with Kinect and Processing, and posted the code on github as controlling a 3d camera via gestures with kinect in Processing. His talk about the demo, and his assistance in getting teams set up, should be the basis for a lot of fun projects.

Health 2.0 / MAKE Developer Challenge happening this weekend in Boston

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