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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 8, 2015

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REAL LIFE NEWS: NEW APP THAT TACKLES NIGHT TERRORS WINS PRIZE

by Hazed

A new app called myBivvy is designed to track the night terrors which sufferers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can suffer from, and the designers have just won the top prize at a coding competition.

The lead programmer, Tyler Skluzacek from New Prague, Minnesota, was inspired by the experience of his father, a veteran of the Iraq War. It is estimated that 11-20% of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan experience PTSD. One of the symptoms is night terrors, in which the sufferers suddenly awake in a panic.

The app, called myBivvy (the name is short for bivouac, temporary soldiers’ quarters), runs on the Pebble Time Smartwatch. It records movements and heart rates of those wearing the watch and displays the data on a smartphone app so the wearer can see it, and sends a more complex statistical analysis directly to a database run by the Department of Veteran Affairs. The plan is for the app to learn to predict night terrors and wake the veteran up before they actually happen.

Skluzacek attended HackDC, a 36-hour coding contest held in Washington DC and recruited his team members on the spot. He explained that the 36-hour contest was very intense: “We actually entered the program with a number of bad ideas that we didn’t know were bad until we talked to clinicians and veterans. None of us considered ourselves to be ‘experts’ in mobile application creation, so much of the competition was us learning new languages and implementing them on the fly.”

When the judges announced Skluzacek’s team had won, he admits, “I was probably the most emotional person in the room, along with some of the veterans I spoke with. It wasn’t like the moment on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire where the winner starts crying because they suddenly have piles of money and can’t figure out what to spend it on. I thought about telling my dad that my idea will help him sleep better someday, and that ‘someday’ is coming up soon.”

The team hope to carry on working on the app in conjunction with the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Source: http://www.macalester.edu/news/2015/10/top-prize-for-ptsd-app/

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