As a summer 2016 Software Engineer Intern at Cerner Corporation, I had the opportunity to participate in the Intern HackFest. The rules were simple, pull together a team of two to four people and within a week create whatever we wanted. Past competitons had featured iPhone Apps, Android apps and twitter controlled drones just to name a few. Anything and everything was fair game. I joined a team with three other interns and on Saturday afternoon we met to brainstorm what we would create. We decided to focus on a healthcare related phone/web application and also wanted to work with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Our final idea took the form of what we called HealtheBeacon. The idea was to have a web application that a user logged into with their Cerner team name. This application would check into a series of Raspberry Pi servers placed throughout Cerner using BLE. This network or mesh of Raspberry Pi servers would be able to track the location of associates and award points based on factors such as time spent at the gym, healthy breaks during the day etc. The iPhone application would also allow associates to enter what they ate for lunch and score it based on how healthy it was.

All of these factors would then be entered into a database and then run through an algorithm to calculate a score for the individual. Each associate is connected to their team and the average score per person per team is also calculated. This is then run through a Ruby on Rails website which can caculate and display the standings between the various teams. Over the course of one week, we were able to implement an iPhone application that could broadcast a BLE signal. We also created the Ruby on Rails website that could connect to a database, run an algorithm, dynamically display the team rankings and the leading team based on the latest information. The one section that we were not able to implement was the scanning on the Rasberry Pi and updating the database. Overall, this week-long Hackfest taught me an immense amount about teamwork, working on a deadline, iPhone application development, BLE and Ruby on Rails. The source code for this project can be found on GitHub I wrote and devloped all code for both the Web Application and iPhone application while my team was in charge of the BLE connection, algorithms, presentation and Rasperry Pi work.