UMD team wins first place in American Public Health Association Codeathon

A team of university students won first place in the annual American Public Health Association Codeathon for the third year in a row — this year for creating an app to analyze life expectancy.

Six graduate students traveled to Chicago for this year’s event, which took place from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1. With about 36 hours to create a way for people to increase their life expectancy, they came up with an app called Text4Health, which gives people an opportunity to understand how to improve their own health, analyze risk behaviors and understand life expectancy. 

“A person addicted to something like smoking or tobacco needs some kind of motivation to actually look at those kind of things,” said Sagar Maniar, an information systems graduate student who was on the team. “We wanted everything to be quite intuitive so that it is very close to the person and [they] will actually adopt to those situations.”

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The group formulated this app with three levels of information in mind: individuals, community, and public policy. While the APHA only asked groups to use one level of information to create an app, this one bridged all three levels, said Junaed Siddiqui, a team member and behavioral and community health doctoral student.

“They were impressed that within such a small amount of time, while every other team had only done one [level], we did three within the same amount of time,” Siddiqui said. 

The app gives users ways to address their biggest health weaknesses, collects the information for a community and sends it to a nearby chief of health officer. The officer can then use that information to help the community, Maniar said. 

Politicians and lawmakers could also use the data at the highest state and federal levels to refer to it when necessary to make policy changes, Siddiqui said.

“Data is only available really at very high-up levels,” Siddiqui said. “This information changes so frequently that it’s not really relevant by the time people are trying to make policy around it.”

With each team member with differing level of expertise, they found it easy to assign roles for the project. Siddiqui used his public health background to create life expectancy models, while information systems graduate students Keyur Shah and Nikita Padhye focused on the business side. Udit Gupta, also an information systems graduate student worked with Maniar on app development. Computer science doctoral student Deok Gun Park worked on the coding.

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Siddiqui said this team was the only one out of the four that participated made up of all students.

“They were able to leverage each other’s expertise to build a better solution,” said Kenyon Crowley, deputy director of the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems. 

Crowley handled the funding and supervised the team this year and was a mentor of the winning team last year.

“One of the key reasons this team was successful was that they were able to bridge information systems, public health, computer science and data visualization,” he said.

While the app isn’t yet available for download, Siddiqui said one judge reached out with interest to help the group refine and test the app to potentially make it available to the public.

“The last frontier in public health is bridging technology with traditional public health ideas,” Siddiqui said. “The whole concept of the codeathon was to bring in people that had specialties in information technology and have them meet with public health professionals in order to create technologically based solutions to decade old public health problems.”