UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ten intercollege teams of enterprising students recently pitched ideas for innovative mobile health applications during Penn State’s mHealth Challenge. The challenge, which held its final round on Nov. 12 as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week Penn State, is a cross-college initiative in which student teams develop a mobile application prototype that addresses a societal health need associated with a specific target audience.
Each team included students from the College of Information Sciences and Technology and at least one student from either the College of Nursing or the Department of Biobehavioral Health in the College of Health and Human Development.
The idea from this year’s winning team was Pediatric Cub Companion, in which an app is used to control a Bluetooth speaker placed inside a stuffed bear to communicate with children about their medical treatment. The project was designed to reduce anxiety in pediatric cancer patients by providing comfort, knowledge and evidence-based coping mechanisms. The team included nursing students Amy Estes and Madison Ramsey, and IST students Jiahua Ma and Peter Meglis.
“We’ve seen in our clinical experience that children have a lot of anxiety about needle-related medical procedures, like IV therapy and immunizations,” said Ramsey. “We focused on the pediatric oncology patient because they’re overloaded with these treatments in a condensed period of time, so we realized that they were at an increased risk for experiencing anxiety during these treatments.”
“Nursing students are able to apply real-life problems that they encounter in their clinicals to the idea and the development of their apps, making it a valuable tool,” said Beth Cutezo, assistant teaching professor of nursing.
In the challenge, undergraduate students who were enrolled in biobehavioral health and nursing classes — led by Joe Gyekis, associate teaching professor of biobehavioral health, and Cutezo, respectively — were charged with identifying the health issue they wanted to address and creating the supporting content. Then, they worked with IST student consultants enrolled in a “Technologies for Digital Entrepreneurs” class led by Megan Costello, assistant teaching professor of IST, to develop a mockup of the mobile app.
"I enjoyed the opportunity to work with students in other disciplines and to brainstorm together," said Ramsey. "t’s important for us in our professional careers to be able to collaborate with people from different backgrounds.”
The idea presented by the second-place team was My Mental Health, an app that serves as a resource for students who have been diagnosed with clinical depression and are transitioning to college. The app acts as a continuation of care by allowing the user to communicate with his or her trusted mental health professional who may be practicing in a different location. Team members included BBH student Meghan Field and IST students Brittany Chapin, Nicholas Menezes and Zeshen You.
“More than one-third of college students suffer from depression,” explained Field. “But they often hide it or don’t realize it, which has adverse effects on how the students perform in their classes, what they do in extracurricular activities, and how they interact with friends.”
Third place went to Smart Smoke Alarm, led by nursing student Sydney Eckert and IST students Ying-Chu Chen, Peter Lehman and Morgan Sterling. The app allows a user to receive notifications to their smartphone from an internet-connected smoke alarm. When the alarm is activated, a user is alerted to call 911 and supply the rescuers with more detailed information from the camera on the alarm, such as if a family member is trapped in a room, so immediate action can be taken.