Our final year BEng(CompSc) student Piyush JHA, together with Cameron Xavier VAN BREDA from Biotechnolgy (Year 4) and Natalie LEE from Psychology (Year 4) formed a HKU team named "Hollo" and won the championship at Microsoft 2020 Imagine Cup Asia Regional Final held earlier this year. The competition was supposed to be in Singapore but became online due to COVID-19. It was held over Microsoft Teams where the finalist teams participated from their respective countries and the judges participated from Microsoft headquarter in Redmond, USA.
Over 28,000 students from over 200 countries registered for this global competition and only 10 teams were selected for the Asia Regional Final. Besides winning a cash prize of USD 8,000 along with Microsoft Azure credits, Team Hollo will also be competing with winners from other regions at the Imagine Cup World Final later this month.
Good luck, Hollo!
What is Hollo?
Hollo is a mental health companion app for the youth, mental health professionals and NGOs; they improve their accessibility to diagnosis and treatment. Unlike Headspace or other mental health apps, they use cutting edge technology to generate behavioral data insights with AI and Big Data Analytics. Their comprehensive data collection through active and passive monitoring combine industry standard tests along with users vitals such as stress levels through heart rate analysis, sleep levels and social media sentiment all through a streamlined 2 minute procedure using a front camera enabled smartphone. Their multiple comprehensive machine learning models can then identify symptoms of various mental issues like depression, anxiety and stress correctly for 4 in 5 users. This helps Hollo give enhanced understanding of the patient's behaviours to not only themselves but their therapists and NGOs connected with them, making the therapy procedure more effective and robust. In addition, the app can then provide a guided therapy path based on the identified symptoms for each user.
