The Lifelines Hackathon ‘24 was an event held at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, where university and high school students participated to create projects they are passionate about. It is where students apply their skills to work as a creative team to address one of the many issues encountered during humanitarian crises. Not only do the winners receive prizes, but the best of projects have a chance of being represented by special guests. The Lifelines Hackathon is more than just a competition, it’s also a way for students to make a significant impact.Â
One of the most impactful teams that participated was the team behind the LifeLink project. This amazing team was comprised of all high schoolers. The team members include Wajd Alrabadi, Faiz Moazam, Galvandi Ibrahim, and Furqan Saeed. All the members worked over 48 hours with almost zero rest to bring this project to life, as they knew the serious effect of resource misallocation.
The LifeLink team is ambitious and hard-working, and it will be tough to explain everything they worked so hard on. Nonetheless, we will discuss the vision of the team, and what they accomplished at the end.Â
What is resource misallocation and how does it affect the healthcare sector?
Simply put, resource misallocation is when capital or labor is poorly distributed, and because of that firms are given an unequal share of capital or labor. In the healthcare sector, vital and extremely cost-effective treatments like tuberculosis treatment remain underfunded, while funds are spent on low-cost health interventions like surgery for most cancers.
What did the team accomplish and how did they divide the work?
LifeLink is an idea for a website that would be an interactive map that allows health aid workers to traverse crisis zones safely, with live updates that they can use to do things such as document medicines, learn about the severity of situations in a region, and plan trips to a specified location. The LifeLink team also created a way of calculating urgency, by multiplying the population density of a region, for example, Khan Yunis by 550 (the average number of Liters of Oxygen consumed by a human per day).Â
The four members of team LifeLink divided the work accordingly: Faiz was responsible for creating the database, Wajd created the interactive map, Furqan handled GUI and the presentation, and finally, Alvan was responsible for business scalability, profitability, sustainability, etc.Â
By the end of the 2 days, team LifeLink was able to create a website that showed 3 markers color-coded based on urgency. Green is least urgent, yellow is moderately urgent, and red is very urgent (dire). The team mentioned that they would like to add a heat map feature in the future, but could only do so much with the limited time they were given.Â
Final results and the future of LifeLink.
The hard work of the LifeLink team paid off in the end, being the only high school team in the top ten. This is a testament to their skills and talents, as they were going up against experienced college students. While the idea of LifeLink is amazing, there is still a lot to be done. The team needs more funding and time to accomplish what they set out for. The LifeLink team is still in high school, and they have their entire career ahead of them. The idea of LifeLink is truly ambitious but it will take hard work and dedication on their part. I trust that they will try their best and truly bring LifeLink to life.Â