Being an engineer at Penn is great for many reasons, but one
of my favorite parts of being at Penn is participating in PennApps. PennApps is
a bi-annual hackathon, a 48-hour competition in which teams collaborate on
programming projects.
At the beginning of the hackathon, my team still hadn’t
thought of an idea for our app. One of the suggested topics for the competition
was healthcare, so we focused on apps in this category to narrow down our
brainstorming. We also took the time to visit each sponsor booth, and one of
the sponsors was Nexmo, a communications company that provides a way to send
texts and make phone calls using code. This piqued our interest, and ultimately
led to the idea for our app.
We decided to build an app for Apple Watch that listens to a
user’s pulse to detect cardiac arrest or other life-threatening heart
conditions. After the watch detects this, we used the Nexmo code to send texts
to emergency contacts and make a call to 911 to receive emergency medical
attention. The biggest challenge in building this project was testing and
demoing the app because we couldn’t just simulate a cardiac arrest every time
we wanted to try out the app. Instead, we changed the Apple Watch code to
listen for normal, healthy heartbeats instead of life-threatening conditions,
and we tested the app by wearing the watch ourselves.
Building the app was truly a team effort, and our hard work was
rewarded when we received a prize for Best Use of the Nexmo API! Each team
member received an Amazon Echo as a prize. It was a great experience to work
with Nexmo and Apple Watch programming for the first time, and I am excited to
participate in PennApps again this semester!
Bethany Davis – CIS, 2017
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