Behind the Scenes with AthenaHacks 2022 Winning Team MaternaMonitor
Victoria Lawton is a junior studying Biomedical Engineering with an electrical emphasis and a minor in Connected Devices and Making. She is also a co-founder and chief operating officer at ZenaTech Inc.
She was part of a winning team — MaternaMonitor — at AthenaHacks 2022, with her teammates Tanya Aggarwal, Rachel Brockman, and Karen Chu. Her team created a smartwatch with the goal of making healthcare accessible for all mothers. The watch recorded the user’s vitals to calculate heart rate variability, which could be shared with their primary care physician and aid in detecting preeclampsia early. It could also detect emergency falls and had functions to connect users with emergency contacts and healthcare services that they need.
What made you sign up for AthenaHacks?
I participated in a wearable technology competition before AthenaHacks and really enjoyed it, so I wanted to try my hand at a true hackathon and see how that would go. It was honestly a little daunting at first because I thought hackathons were exclusively for Computer Science majors but I quickly realized I could build any type of project I wanted, which was really cool.
How did you find your teammates?
I went into AthenaHacks as a team of three, with one of my teammates being a colleague from a startup I worked on and the other from my BME class. Our fourth teammate reached out at the beginning of the hackathon and joined the team on the day of.
How did you and your team come up with the idea for AthenaHacks?
All of us were interested in medical technology, particularly in wearable technology, with most of our team made up of biomedical engineering majors. We started off by spitballing ideas, then downscaling them to make the project feasible within the 24-hour timeframe.
What was your team’s process like during the hackathon?
The key to success is splitting the project into different sections and assigning them to each team member based on their strengths. We split MaternaMonitor into four sections: smartwatch prototype with SolidWorks, data analysis with MATLAB, website development, and marketing.
This was the best strategy because our team ran into a brick wall trying to get the smartwatch sensor’s data to connect with Twilio. The Bluetooth connection wasn’t working and we ended up having to physically plug in the sensor and write a script to link the data. This would not have been possible without my teammate Rachel’s expertise in the area.
We also ran into some smaller bugs with our C++ code, but the AthenaHacks mentors were extremely helpful in helping us debug these errors and get our project up and running.
What tips do you have for people attending a hackathon?
My biggest tip would be to spend enough time figuring out what type of project you want to work on. The scope should be reasonable and within the capabilities of your team members. It’s also essential to find good team members that you mesh well with and can rely on. A hackathon is a high-stress environment due to the time crunch in developing an entire project from scratch, so it’s crucial that all the personalities on your team work well together.
How can someone with less/ no coding experience contribute to their team?
They can carry more of the discussion with project ideation and offer creative solutions to any problems that arise. It’s not crucial to have coding experience, it is helpful for debugging and resolving syntax errors, but it definitely isn’t a deal breaker. I suggest that people with less coding experience team up with someone more experienced to learn from them.
For example, my team had a business student who didn’t have any coding experience but she was still a key player in making the project a success. She was able to offer a new perspective from a non-engineering lens, especially when we were talking through our thought process, she was able to spot logical inconsistencies that we glossed over.
Learn more about MaternaMonitor here
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Interested in participating as a hacker in the next AthenaHacks?
AthenaHacks 2023 is taking place on February 25–26, 2023 in a hybrid format! We are open to all 18+ students with a marginalized gender identity (women, non-binary, gender-fluid, etc.)
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