I love the commitment and positive effects that result from taking an oath. Those of us who have built startups have come to understand the deep importance of company values and mission statements. Although they share basic similarities, company values and mission statements are always specific to one company, while the Hippocratic Oath is a values statement for an entire profession. Whatever your opinions are on how seriously the majority of doctors take this oath, the fact that it exists is inspiring.

So, as Monsoon gets more serious about health technology, we’ve started thinking about how we’d modify the Hippocratic Oath for people like us: aspiring health technologists.

What you see below is a working copy of an oath we’re thinking about making here at Monsoon.

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

1. Software is not medicine, surgery, courage, love, or discipline. At best, it complements and supports these things.

2. I understand that my software does not primarily exist to organize 1s & 0s or dollars & cents, but rather to serve the health and wellness of human beings.

3. I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that my work will be most successful when it promotes connection, warmth, sympathy, and understanding.

4. I will remember that prevention is preferable to cure and always strive to create tools that prioritize prevention.

5. I understand that technical innovation leads to disruption, which may be in conflict with cultural norms and profit motives. I will work to forge through obstacles with respect and courage.

6. I understand that human beings possess an inherent desire and ability to heal themselves, and I will create tools and efficiencies to help them take control of their own healing process.

7. I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed so that the world may know. I will make privacy and security paramount in all that I create.

8. I will not be ashamed to say “I know not”, nor will I fail to call on my colleagues or the larger community when the skills of another are needed. I understand that I am also expected to support other and contribute to this community that supports me.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life, technology, and art, be respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of supporting the process of healing.

[note: the modern Hippocratic Oath actually has very little in common with its original predecessor, which in addition to other things, requires that doctors live a celibate life. Obviously, if doctors took the ancient Hippocratic Oath, we would never have had Grey's Anatomy.   We've worked off the modern Hippocratic Oath…we we would do anything for health technology, but you know.]

AAMF’s founder, Deepak Chopra (no, not that Deepak Chopra, though we think he’s every bit as cool) recently needed 300 laptops for a new education center. Astonishingly enough, with just these few hundred computers, he estimates he’ll be able to teach over 100,000 kids enough business English, personality-development curricula, and computer skills to help them gain a foothold in the emerging Indian tech industry. It’s an amazing cause, and we were more than happy to use our expertise, network, and buying power to get AAMF the computers they needed. Who knows? The next big Indian tech giant could be typing away right now on a laptop we sourced.

For more information on AAMF, and how you can help kids break the cycle of poverty, check out their website.

the challenge: build a compelling driving game for the iPad
Our client started with a fun premise for an iPad game: she noticed that whenever she was driving her three children around town, they would often pretend to be driving themselves, holding an imaginary steering wheel in the air. Her goal was to bring the imaginary experience into the real world, with a kid-friendly driving game for the iPad. Unfortunately, when we examined the existing selection of iOS driving games, we found that the market was already saturated. How could we make a driving game for kids that stood out from the pack?

watch what the rugrats do
I have three kids of my own, and when it’s time to get out of the car, they rarely use the passenger doors. Instead, they clamber over to the front seat, where they can play with the knobs and buttons on the dashboard (and annoy their dad, who has to fix all the reset radio prefixes and new mirror positions they leave in their wake). That gave me an idea: What if our game wasn’t focused on controlling the movement of the car, but instead centered on playing with the buttons on the dashboard?

ultimate driving machine
Our designer, Katharine Woodman-Maynard, worked with me to determine what the app could do. We decided to focus on designing an interactive dashboard with buttons, knobs, levers, and pedals that, when pressed, would produce different fun actions or sounds. Some of them were obvious: pulling a lever would work the windshield wipers, while pressing the center of the wheel would produce a horn noise. Others were more fantastical. Some of the fun ones we came up with: pressing the A/C button to change the weather in the car, creating a snow flurry or thunderstorm; turning a knob to change the color of the car; and pressing a bird-shaped button to get a splat of bird poop on the windshield (which the “driver” would need to clean off with the wipers).

Even though the game isn’t oriented around steering the path of the car, that doesn’t mean a kid using it can’t have any say in where they’re traveling. We designed a knob that could take kids places their parents’ cars wouldn’t normally go: rolling through a desert ghost town, flying past planets and shooting stars on a trip through space, or cruising past fish and sharks underwater.

While we wanted the car to be magical and unique, we didn’t want to completely neglect the real world, so we added some educational elements to the car as well. Changing radio stations can teach kids about the sounds of different musical instruments, while other buttons can teach kids the names and sounds of different farm animals. We even designed the wheel to play the alphabet song at different speeds when it was turned.

vintage-modern ipad game
To get inspiration for the design, Katharine began looking at photos of different car interiors. “I was quickly drawn to vintage cars,” she says. “Their interiors tended to be more playful and have more interesting and varied knobs and buttons, which are important for keeping kids engaged. I was particularly drawn to the 1962 Corvette Roadster, which uses circles throughout its design.”

“Although I liked the brilliant colors that made up the interiors of many cars from the 1950s-1970s, I decided to make the dashboard a neutral grey so that the colored buttons and knobs would pop out visually,” Katharine says. Her first design sketch looks a lot like the Corvette’s dashboard, but with some extra technological bells and whistles that Chevy didn’t offer back in ‘62.

After we decided to add the fun exterior elements, Katharine updated her sketch with a more contemporary wheel and a different viewing angle.

Here’s the most recent design for the dashboard, featuring the desert landscape. As you can see, Katharine’s added a few more things to play with, including an analog clock that helps kids learn to tell time. (If they play with it enough, a bird will even pop out, like a cuckoo clock.)

the app?
We’re still putting the finishing touches on this app, but if you’re interested in playing with the final product, subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll be the first to know when it comes out.

I’m writing this at 2:30 in the morning, while a group of brilliant programmers, designers, and behavioral psychologists buzzes around me, still going strong. It’s great to finally be able to share what we’re working on here at TED.

Like millions of kids around the world, I struggled with asthma throughout my childhood. I spent recesses indoors, was hospitalized more than once, and used inhalers several times a day. My parents and doctors tried all sorts of things: steroids, allergy shots, breathing treatments, but none of them really seemed to make any sort of long-term impact on my asthma.

I eventually used a combination of exercise, diet, and breathing exercises to almost fully eradicate my asthma. And since then, I’ve always wanted to do something to help young people challenged with asthma.

Your breath is one of those things that your body is supposed to handle. it’s supposed to make your heart beat and fill your lungs with oxygen. When it doesn’t, you live in a state of constant fear of the next attack.

Some facts:
- 25% of all ER visits are due to asthma attacks
- 300 million people around the world suffer from asthma
- 250,000 people die every year from an attack

We are up tonight working on mobile applications that can help children who suffer from asthma. We’re using a combination of SMS and native iOS for the first products, and we should be able to show you something soon!

Monsoon is incredibly proud to be partnering with TED and Bing to produce the first-ever TED Hackathon at this year’s TED conference.

Hackathons are special events: something extraordinary occurs when creative cognitive freedom is combined with time constraints.  In the absence of the luxury of time, the brain focuses – and when things go well, this can produce fantastic moments of insight.   If you think about it, that’s what makes a TED talk special; take brilliant minds and give them a maximum of 18 minutes to distill their ideas into a concentrate of epiphany.  This is part of the reason we’re so excited to be throwing a Hackathon at TED…great minds, great talks, and now (hopefully), great apps!

For those who don’t know, a hackathon is an competition lasting from a day to a week, where programmers and developers work in small collaborative teams to build something new in a short window of time – a sort of coding sprint.

So, how is a hackathon different from, lets say, clocking crazy hours at work?  Hackathons encourage creative solutions to unique problems that may be overlooked or out of reach on the company dime.  Facebook is well known for its hackathons.  It uses the events as a means of maintaining and perpetuating that innovative startup culture which is often extinguished by rapid growth.  Developers participate because they’re passionate about the cause, and not because they have to.  At Monsoon, we’re passionate about preventative health.  We want to inspire a generation of entrepreneurs to build mobile health apps that help people before they get sick, not just after.  Much like an 18-minute TED Talk, our hackathon is not intended revolutionize preventative healthcare in and of itself, but rather to plant the seeds of inspiration that will grow and cross-pollinate with other ideas, giving way to meaningful progress.

Let’s have a look at 5 best practices to make for a great hackathon.

1. Create an Objective

While it is imperative for hackathons to encourage and facilitate outside-the-box creative thinking, it’s equally important to have a guiding principle, theme, or objective.  What is the bigger picture?  Are we working to make people more productive, to make them laugh, or to make them healthier?  As I mentioned, our objective is preventative healthcare.  Perhaps because we naturally don’t respond to gradual stimuli as we do to instant and dramatic stimuli, preventative healthcare takes a back seat to treatment and cures.  But with a critical mass of powerful, connected, and constantly accessible mobile devices, we’re presented with a tremendous opportunity to conveniently affect change and shift habits through what Stanford Professor BJ Fogg calls “mobile persuasion” in his book Texting 4 Health.  “Mobile persuasion” is the idea that small actions like a text message can be used to remind people to take their vitamins, do their pushups, schedule appointments, over time adding up to significant behavioral changes.

2.  Get the right people

This one almost goes without saying.  A hackathon can last several grueling days.  It’s not called a hackathon for nothing.  The ideal developers aren’t doing it because they want to show off how they can chug Red Bull and stay up for 48 hours.  They’re doing because they believe in the objective, and they want to use their talents to make a difference.  For a great hackathon, you need smart, dedicated, talented developers.  Many companies like Facebook host hackathons on college campuses for recruitment.  Hackathons are great proving grounds.  Given that our hackathon will be at TED, we have access to a fantastic talent pool.

Beyond developers, it’s also important to have a vanguard; a handful of relevant industry experts to provide onsite insight and answer questions developers may have during the course of the hackathon.  In our particular case this may be doctors, health startup entrepreneurs familiar with best-practices, or even legal experts to define ethical guidelines, given the sensitivity to privacy in health care.   And let’s not forget the MCs.  Yes, a good hackathon needs great people to pump up the crowd and catalyze the caffeine and code.

3. Identify and Set Constraints

How long will this hackathon be?  Is it just an overnighter or does it go on for a week?  As I said, setting time constraints creates focus and a sense of urgency.  But beyond time, it’s important to understand the physical and technological constraints of the systems and devices we are developing for.  What I/O and sensors are available on today’s mobile devices?  What APIs can and can’t be used?  In our case, we’re more concerned with mobile persuasion, rather than hardware potential.

4. Encourage Competition

This is where the “athon” comes into play.   Yes, a hackathon is a competition just as a marathon is.  Competition simply makes things better, whether it’s in business or sports.  In a hackathon, developers are competing against time, other groups, and even themselves.  Encourage and foster this competition, and get better results.  This is where those unruly MCs can really shake things up.

5.  Provide Incentive/Reward

This one goes hand in hand with encouraging competition.  Provide incentive to compete by giving rewards.  What do developers get for participating?  More importantly, what do they get for winning?  A new laptop, a tablet, a cash prize, a job offer?

Spending up to a week in a room coding should be fun.  A great hackathon will be an entertaining and enjoyable experience.  Some successful hackathons blast electronic music and engage in epic NERF gun shootouts.  Most provide quick mobile foods like pizza, or Chinese.  They generously stock energy drinks and sugary treats.  Some hackathons even provide inflatable mattresses for catnaps.

So these are 5 best practices for a successful hackathon.   As we prepare for ours at TED, let’s have a look at some cool things to come out of hackathons:

Facekbook hackathons: Facebook’s photo system, friend suggester, Facebook chat, Facebook for Nintendo Wii

NJIT hackathon: “Research Driftr” – which places scientific papers onto a map of the world corresponding to the university where the research was done built as a mashup between data from the SciVerse Applications and Google Maps API

Eventbrite HTML5 hackathon: Feature-rich Eventbrite app for Windows Phone7