Khalifa University launches Summer Challenge 2020

Khalifa University of Science and Technology today announced the launch of Khalifa University Summer Challenge 2020 for high school students in Grades 11-12, encouraging them to design ‘eDoctor’, an online system to connect patients with available doctors for consultation, without physically visiting the healthcare premises.

Students will have to design the eDoctor system in such a way it can prove useful to urgent cases that cannot reach hospital, emergency cases that do not have doctors in an area, late-night emergencies, and also for preliminary examination of patients.

In order to participate, the students should visit the site (
https://www.highschoolchallenge.ae/) and register as a team of minimum three and maximum five members. The registration is open until 28th July 2020. The registered teams will be provided with detailed guidelines and help during the competition. The final work should be submitted via the site on Monday 31st August 2020 the latest.

Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, said, "The Khalifa University Summer Challenge 2020 is one of the innovation-related initiatives that we are launching to encourage high school students to engage in critical scientific thinking. An online consultation system would be useful for the entire community that could be very handy in times of medical or healthcare crisis, especially during pandemics such as COVID-19. We are delighted to open this challenge for the students, and believe this will inspire them to seek solutions that will have social, economic and scientific impact."

Students’ submissions will be assessed on several criteria including the number of supported information sources, communication response delays, versatility of implementation, user-friendliness including handling of ethics issues, mechanism for doctor’s selection, and design aesthetics. From a business viability perspective, the submitted project should propose a justifiable business model and user scenario.

Any submitted project should accommodate a minimum of four different sources of information exchange such as photo/video capturing, chatting, emailing, audio recording, GPS tracking, and emergency calls. Additional features such as a real-time communication protocol, along with emergency level settings and uploading capabilities for combined analyses, reports or prescriptions would gain more chances of winning the challenge.

For selection of doctors, the online system should have various options such as ‘manual’ for the user, ‘automatic’ for the most-available and highly-ranked doctor, and ‘default’ for the widely preferred one. Judges will look for user-friendliness, suitability of the app for both Android and iOS operating systems, and a desktop version for Windows and Apple. There will be no restriction on the use of software.

The eDoctor normal path can correspond to ‘one’ or ‘many’ (optional) with different specialties such as a dermatologist, cardiologist, pathologist, or psychologist. However, the ‘emergency path’ is imperative to all.

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