A website and a chatbot developed by a team led by Kamil Dzieniszewski, an Automation and Robotics graduate from the Warsaw University of Technology Faculty of Production Engineering, have won the Health category. The winning concept is intended to support the efforts of the Rak’n’Roll Foundation members and will be implemented at the beginning of 2019.

The Rak’n’Roll Foundation runs an initiative called “Daj Włos!” (“Share Your Hair!”) to help people suffering from cancer. As part of the campaign, specially cut and prepared hair can be donated through hairdressers to the Foundation to be then made into wigs and provided to patients. An impressive number of 41,000 donations have been made in 2018 alone. But although certain automated solutions are in place, still many donators use a variety of channels to reach the Foundation’s office and find out about their donation. Answering all their questions takes up approx. 50% of the working time for three members of the team of seven.

The solution proposed by the hackathon winning team is designed to help reclaim some of that time, which could be otherwise spent engaging directly with patients. The winning team are:

• Kamil Dzieniszewski (a graduate of the Warsaw University of Technology; Developer and Marketing Coordinator); 
• Piotr Korlaga (a graduate of the Military University of Technology and Developer); 
• Krzysztof Jedynak (a graduate of the Military University of Technology and Developer); and 
• Krystian Gorski (Scrum Master).

Every donor will be able to track their donation via a dedicated website to see if their hair has already been delivered to the Foundation and an FB Messenger bot will efficiently refer askers to that website. The service will operate 24 hours a day.

The HackYeah Festival is Europe’s largest event of this kind and one of the largest in the world. Coding experts and enthusiasts flock together to work on teams to solve a range of different programming challenges and to attend workshops and lectures.