The student of the Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering at FIB, Oriol Aranda Llorens, has won the 1st prize at the Share4Rare hackathon, RareHacks, held from 5 to 7 July 2019 at MOB Barcelona (Makers of Barcelona). His team, composed of Sergi del Río, Celia Sánchez, Lucía Chacón and David Pujol, was awarded €1,500 sponsored by Deister Software.
In total, 45 people participated in this first international edition, forming six teams that had to develop, in three days, a new way to address the limited access to reliable medical information faced by patients and families living with a rare disease. This year’s theme focused on pediatric melanoma, an ultra-rare condition with extremely low prevalence.
Oriol Aranda and the rest of the group created a chatbot called RareBot, which provides users with information and assistance, such as identifying the nearest hospital based on their geolocation. In addition, they incorporated multilingual capabilities into the tool, as well as word correction during interaction and the possibility for multiple users to access it simultaneously.
The event was organized by UPC, which is one of the partners of the Share4Rare consortium. The Share4Rare project, a social network for families and people affected by rare diseases, is funded by the European Commission and its main objective is to create a platform capable of compiling data on these pathologies and contributing to making the knowledge obtained useful for patients.
