Team NeuroTech, made up of four students from the Vanderbijlpark Campus, were announced the 2021 Discovery GradHack winners. They are Franco Bester, a BSc IT honours student, and third-year BSc IT students Rudi Dreyer, Ivan Pretorius and Chris Neuhoff.

 

The Discovery Graduate Hackathon is a competition for IT students from South African universities. This year, 50 students had the chance to be part of an immersive work experience, using technology to solve real-life challenges for the Discovery medical scheme.

 

App fights overweight and sedentary living

 

Their pitch focused on the problems of overweight and sedentary living associated with modern living and the Covid-19 lockdowns in particular. They pointed out South Africa is one of the top 30 countries for obesity, with 36% of men and 68% of women considered overweight.

 

The solution they proposed is a mobile app that will allow people to exercise in the comfort of their own homes, while receiving Discovery miles based on how much they exercise.

 

The app would feature a Discovery sign-in facility, a selection of cardiovascular exercises, and keypoint detection and neural tracking to monitor the user’s exercise routine, which would be recorded using smartphone video facilities.

 

Teams from Wits University, Stellenbosch University, University of Pretoria, University of the Free State and University of Johannesburg also took part in this challenge.

 

A healthy cash injection

 

Each member of the NWU’s Team NeuroTech received a prize to the value of R10 000 and the NWU, as the winning university, received a cash prize of R50 000. The four students also stand a chance to be permanently employed at Discovery. All four have already been for interviews with Discovery and have all received job offers.

 

“We encountered challenges such as time constraints during the GradHack but we managed to overcome them,” the team said. “Discovery was also very supportive throughout the whole process and provided us with care packages consisting of food, drinks and gift vouchers.”

 

Applause on the home front

 

The importance of taking part in opportunities such as GradHacks cannot be stressed enough, says Dr JT Janse van Rensburg, the lecturer from the School of Computer Sciences who has been supporting the team.

 

She says these events offer students the opportunity to collaborate with companies in their chosen fields in working on real-world problems using industry-relevant *technology stacks. In most cases, these events are a talent-scouting opportunity for companies and provide tangible evidence of software development experience for graduate CVs.

 

* A technology stack is a combination of programming languages, frameworks, and tools that developers use to build a web or mobile app. Source: Perfectial