University Undergraduates to Develop Healthcare Apps for Kainos AppCamp?

Date posted
7 August 2012
Reading time
5 Minutes

University Undergraduates to Develop Healthcare Apps for Kainos AppCamp?

London, UK August 07th, 2012 - Five university undergraduates have been selected to progress to the final stages of Kainos's annual innovation challenge, AppCamp?. The Kainos summer AppCamp provides a unique and exciting opportunity for young developers and entrepreneurs to conceive and develop their own innovative mobile apps. Each year this unprecedented initiative captures the imagination of some of the most talented students as they compete to get their iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad apps into the Apple App Store. This summer's 11 'AppCampers' pitched their app ideas to a panel of experts including Brendan O'Brien, Consultant Public Heath Doctor with the Public Health Agency, Paul McCoy, Investment Manager at Invest NI and Tom Gray, Kainos's Chief Technology Officer, in a bid to progress to the final stages of the competition. The students with the most innovative app ideas aimed at healthcare education and improving the lives of sufferers of various conditions, have been selected to return to Kainos for the remainder of the summer to develop and launch their app on the Apple App Store. The finalists, who hail from Queens University Belfast and University of Ulster, will develop apps for sufferers of diabetes (Beta-Betes), early on-set dementia (Memory Manager) and cystic fibrosis (CF Buddy and Acystant) as well as educating and alerting travellers of the necessary vaccination information for regions worldwide (Vacci-Nations). Discussing this year's AppCamp, Tom Gray, CTO at Kainos, said, 'We're delighted with both the calibre of students that this year's AppCamp has attracted and the quality of the ideas that they have generated. We're confident that the apps will provide real and tangible benefits.' Following six weeks of intensive development and testing, the students will release their apps and compete for the chance to be crowned winner of this year's competition based on a range of criteria including number of downloads and reviews. While the competition is running the apps will be free to download, however the student developers can opt to charge for any subsequent updates if they wish, and any revenue generated will be theirs to keep. The apps are expected to be released in September and the winner, who will take away the latest Apple devices, will be announced towards the end of the year. Follow @KainosAppCamp on Twitter throughout the summer for more information.  src= Finalists from left to right are: Paul Acheson (QUB), Cormac Quinn (QUB), Alison Campbell (UUC), Andrew Paul (QUB) and Sean Mackin (QUB)