Healthzilla Wins Award in the World’s Largest Online Hackathon to Fight COVID-19 Challenges

Photo: Screenshot from the Healthzilla app

Easter weekend saw more than 11000 bright minds from close to 100 countries working tirelessly on business and digital solutions that will help fight the COVID-19 challenges. The 48-hour hackathon ‘The Global Hack’ was set up with the ambition to encourage collaboration across companies, sectors, and competencies on a global level to imagine the possibilities and create solutions to meet the needs of our changing world.

Singaporean health tech startup Healthzilla’s solution “COVID-19 Early Detection with HRV” was selected 3rd in the Health & Wellness track and awarded a cash price of 5000€. Their winning solution was based on the Healthzilla’s real-time data analysis capabilities utilizing 20 different biometric and behavioral data types. During the hackathon, the Zilla team further developed their existing technology which is able to detect acute changes in HRV (heart rate variability) with symptom tagging features so they’ll be able to get labeled datasets for research purposes. 

“Our entire team is thrilled and honored for the recognition as the competition saw so many brilliant solutions and the judges had a hard time picking the winners,” says Laura Ranin, CEO of Healthzilla. “We’ve developed and tested our technology for capturing and analyzing user’s heart rate and HRV signals for more than a year in the consumer market, and we know that true scalability requires that the measurement is done without any external equipment or sensors, or expensive trackers and wearable devices,” she continues. “Our measurement can be done at the convenience of your own home with a simple fingertip scan utilizing your smartphone camera,” she concludes.

After the hackathon, Healthzilla is eager to identify the right research or healthcare partner to form a partnership for the initial validation project. “Once we’ve collected the data, we’ll apply it to refine the algorithms for COVID-19 use case specifically, and then share the findings and data with relevant researchers globally so the learnings can be applied in each country to battle the second wave of COVID-19,” explains Ranin.