Macalester College senior Tyler Skluzacek arrived at a coding competition in Washington D.C. last month with programming smarts and a desire to help veterans, like his father, who have post-traumatic stress disorder.
All he needed was a good idea and a team to pursue it.
In 36 hours.
By the time the HackDC competition concluded, at the end of the Sept. 25-27 weekend, Skluzacek and his team of four coders had earned a top prize for creating the best clinical app. The myBivy smartwatch app tracks symptoms of night terrors that disrupt sleep in people with PTSD.
After talking with veterans and clinicians, the team eliminated a number of "bad ideas" for PTSD solutions and honed in on a program that could predict night terrors by monitoring variations in the wearer's pulse and movement. Feedback to the app from veterans wearing the watch, and doctors who receive data from it remotely, help it determine when night terrors come on.
The app needs to "learn in the first couple of weeks of the soldier wearing it," said Skluzacek, 21, who is from New Prague. "So that it knows, 'OK, this is what night terrors in this person always start out as."
Military records show that 10 to 15 percent of veterans from the Vietnam and Gulf wars, and operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, receive diagnosis of PTSD.
The disorder causes sufferers to relive trauma, even in the absence of danger, through flashbacks, insomnia, agitation and other symptoms. It can also produce night terrors marked by screaming, intense fear and flailing while sleeping.
