Congratulations! HKU Team "Hollo", which comprised of Piyush JHA and Ajit Krishna NAMAKKAL RAGHAVENDRAN, both BEng(CompSc) final year students, and Cameron Xavier VAN BREDA from Biotechnology (Year 4), was crowned World Champion of Microsoft 2020 Imagine Cup. They developed a mental health companion web app leveraging Azure analytics and AI services to advance youth therapy practice. The team won USD100,000, a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and USD50,000 in Azure grants. This is the first time that a team from Hong Kong won the World Championship in the Microsoft Imagine Cup since its launch in 2003.
More details of the team can be viewed here.
More on the project:
Hollo envisions a future of tech-based, accessible, and comprehensive personal health management tools. As a Smart AI Powered Preventative platform, Hollo, aims at improving the mental health of individuals by integrating Machine Learning with suggestive diagnosis, therapy, and continual monitoring, facilitating self-help and professional therapeutic services. By reducing the need for additional technology (wearables), we make this new tracking technology accessible for less privileged communities in the world. We hold two value propositions close to our heart. We equip those finding stress points or symptoms of mental illness in their lives with a quantitative solution to help track their mental health through different metrics like sleep quality, heart rate, stress and social media sentiment. We aim to continue to improve our research in collaboration with research departments from universities around the world. As a platform, Hollo also equips therapists (and their NGOs), who don’t have consistent, quality patient feedback to aid retentive treatment, with a back-end webapp equipped with empirical and actionable findings on their patients; using the data analysis to enhance time efficiency, and construct predictive models. Streamlining admin services and improving the screening processes for institutions to reach out to at-risk individuals.
