HIVE & Wolfpack Digital eMental Health Hackathon

As Mental Health Awareness Month has just ended, let’s take a look back to the experience of the first mental health hackathon ever organized in Romania on March 26-27, by HIVE Centre for Health Innovation from Cluj School of Public Health, together with yours truly, Wolfpack Digital.

Here are a few interesting numbers about the HIVE & Wolfpack Digital eMental Health Hackathon:

• 12 Teams registered for the hackathon, and 9 pitched their final ideas

• 13 Challenges were open to the contestants, grouped on the following 4 main areas: Mental Health & Prevention, Mental Health & Disease, Mental Health & Wellbeing, and Mental Health & AI

• 13 Mentors with diverse backgrounds and international experience supported the initiative: mentors included entrepreneurs, psychotherapists, doctors, IT professionals, university representatives, and public health & communication specialists. We were represented by Corina Stirbu, our CMO, and Georgina Lupu Florian, our CEO, as mentors.

• 4 Jury Members voted for the best teams: Valentin Bejan from Health Tech Hub Copenhagen, Mircea Miclea from Cognitrom, Mihai Bran from Atlas.app, and Georgina Lupu Florian from Wolfpack Digital.

• 3 Minutes were reserved for each startup idea pitch 

• There were 2 x Winners to the event with prizes in cash: SoberProtect, an app helping with the management of mental health implications in addictions, and TherAmi, an AI-powered companion app for psychotherapists

• The hackathon was a 100% online experience, with some very cool physical props being delivered to mentors and participants alike in the days before the event

The hackathon opened on Friday evening with a warm kickoff delivered by the organizers, sponsors, and mentors, and continued all the way to Saturday evening, with multiple mentoring sessions and ended with the pitches, jury deliberations, and prizes announcement. A short, but intense and inspiring day, spent mainly online on Discord and back to the virtual & physical drawing board, showing us all just how much can be done by harnessing the power of technology and bringing digital transformation to mental health field. 

We see our commitment to raising awareness about mental health challenges, reducing stigma, and developing healthtech solutions for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, as an essential one. This hackathon’s main two purposes have been to bring together students, professionals, and experts from multiple disciplines to get accustomed to working together on concepts for digital healthtech products and solve complex problems in ways that bring their diverse knowledge together. 

It was impressive to see the atmosphere of an online hackathon getting so close to that of an on-site hackathon, perhaps fueled by the depth of the topics approached in the hackathon, which resonates with most of us on the most human level possible. 

A big thank you goes to all the mentors and jury members for sharing their valuable insights! We’d also like to congratulate the winners, the organizers, and every single one of the participants for their contribution! Together we can transform mental health for the better and expand the preoccupation for medtech, by shedding more light on mental health!

Interested to learn more about Wolfpack Digital’s contribution to healthtech? You can read more about the health web and mobile apps we’ve worked on and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. Our knack for mental health is shown too by the two digital products we’ve built internally in our startup division called Wolfpack Digital Labs: Medusa, the first mindfulness app in Romanian, and Pamble, the first digital treatment for gambling addiction.