Team: Malena Ohl (Team Lead), Lisa Deng, Wen Zeng, Juan Angulo, Ming Wang
How can we improve pediatric pain communication in hospitals and homes?
One Booboo Buddy team created Booboo Buddy, a toy and phone application that allows children to visually communicate their pain and help adults track changes in pain over time.
Every four seconds, a child is treated for an injury in an emergency department. To begin treating injuries, doctors and nurses use pain assessment tools to determine the location and intensity of the patient's pain. Current pain assessment tools (1) don't capture multiple pain dimensions at once and (2) only measure pain at a single point in time. This is where the Boo Boo Buddy can help. Designed with children in mind, the Boo Boo Buddy is a dry erasable stuffed animal that allows children to (1) mark where it hurts (2) add stickers to show how much it hurts (3) update their boo-boos over time to track recovery progress. Using an accompanying smartphone app, the Boo-Boo Buddy allows doctors and nurses to track changes in a patient's pain level over time and gain insight into treatment effectiveness. The Boo-Boo Buddy leads to more effective pain management and treatment in pediatric patients.
Team: Libby Zhang (Team Lead), Akash Agarwal, Vicky Gong, Claire Robinson, Julia Rue
How can we increase accessibility of food pantries to low-income, working families? Hunger is not a third-world problem. It is all around us, invisible and sinuous in the people it touches and and the ways it affects them. The hunger within the Greater Boston community manifests itself largely in households reducing their food intake and reducing the quality and variety of their diet due to competing basic needs. For example, over half of the hungry interviewed by the Greater Boston food had to choose between food and utilities (such as heat and electricity), rent and mortgage payments, and medical care. These choices are unacceptable, because food security should be a basic right.
In particular, our F.R.E.S.H team helped working families who do not receive enough government assistance to support their households and who cannot take advantage of local food pantries who have limited hours of operations. They worked to increase the accessibility and the availability of food to these families in partnership with already established food pantries and community centers. As a result, they created F.R.E.S.H. containers, which are distribution machines that store fresh food packages that families can pick up after the food pantry closes.
Team: Caroline Chin (Team Lead), Marisa Sotolongo, Roberto Soto, Ruth Park
Teachers spend hours every day designing worksheets that cover the same concepts that are taught all around the world. While the content has been taught many times before, teachers often create their worksheets from scratch because it’s hard to find material that matches their teaching style.
Our WTE team created an online platform that allows teachers to drag and drop questions from a bank of crowdsourced problems to easily customize the perfect worksheet that fits their teaching style and their classroom. Additionally, the platform can recommend questions based on the types of problems they have used for previous worksheets.
This can save hours of time every day, allowing teachers to focus on students who need the most help or take some time to relax before after a busy day at school.
Team: Julia Canning (Team Lead), Wei Xun He, Yooni Kim, Anika Gupta
How can we help homeless shelters better serve the needs of the homeless population?
The Allocator is an app that helps homeless shelter street teams track information about resources used at specific locations so that they can better keep track of the needs of the homeless.