LevTech Entrepreneurship Center unites tech, business and health sciences students, graduates, faculty to provide solutions for those affected by the coronavirus. The coronavirus has physically separated people, moved people away from each other. LevTech and JCT want to use this opportunity to bring people together, to unite them, to provide a bridge between needs and solutions.
Social service organizations, children’s hospital, medical service organizations and others are in need of volunteers, industrial and tech solutions to deal with the new current reality. Facilities for children with disabilities have to find ways to entertain and provide therapy remotely. Organizations need new ways to deliver food. Physicians need new ways to remotely receive information from patients, including vital signs. Diagnostics have to be done remotely or with limited contact, including for coronavirus symptoms. And the list goes on.
The LevTech Entrepreneurship Center, housed at The Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT) (“Machon Lev”), has students, graduates and faculty who are willing to help find social, industrial and technological solutions for those affected by the current situation.
JCT is an engineering, health sciences and business college in Jerusalem for the Orthodox community. JCT has 4500 students, approximately 2,000 of whom are Haredi (ultraOrthodox).
This is not a regular hackathon where the goal is to get to a proof of concept stage. The goal here is to provide a solution or product that can be immediately used in the coming weeks.
We have already begun speaking with organizations like Shalva – the Israel Association for the Care and Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities, Magen David Adom, Melabev – an organization for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients, a physician involved with telemedicine, etc. and more about their specific needs. We plan to publicize the program so that other organizations will present their challenges and apply for help. Some organizations need actual products or apps to go remote where no one has gone remote before. MDA needs us to organize masses of students to take extra online courses to become medics and coronavirus call center experts, as well as to develop tech solutions to enable noncontact/only tech sampling of potential patients at home and outside. Some need to find new efficient processes to deliver food to clients/patients that used to receive food at day centers. Others need help converting their current programs for dementia patients into online versions accessible by caretakers at home and for therapists to work with them
remotely. Some need tech bridges, e. g. matching and enabling willing musicians and other artists to interact live and remotely with children with disabilities.
LevTech is in touch with all JCT students and faculty, as well as graduates, who can help provide solutions to the problems mentioned above, and others. Those will software and electrical engineering backgrounds can work on solutions involving needed apps, remote contact and electronic and electro-optic equipment that can substitute for human contact in the medical or emergency medicine fields. Those with industrial engineering backgrounds can help develop new processes for social service organizations to provide food and other materials to their clients. Others can provide the matchmaking and tech bridges between experts/artists/others and organizations that need their services but haven’t used remote access technology before.
LevTech staff is ready to work on this intensively to coordinate the program, reach out to organizations, do the marketing to students, graduates and faculty, and work with the administration. This was not part of LevTech’s plan for the year, and the staff is willing to take this on in addition to their full-time responsibilities.
The JCT academic administration is willing to allow students who work on these projects for at least 60 hours to receive academic credit.
We estimate that this program will last for approximately 4-6 weeks. During this time we hope to see finished projects as well as tech solutions and bridges.
Request:
For this project to work, we need to hire a project manager with experience in leading hitech products from ideation to finished product, especially for web and mobile. The project manager will also guide the student teams, be the bridge with the organizations, ensure that projects meet milestones and more. We will also need tech mentors to get the teams.
We believe that over the next 4-6 weeks this program will cost $20,605.
| $US exchange rate | ||
|---|---|---|
| ITEM | NIS | 3.5 |
| LevTech staff and coordinators | in-kind | |
| Project manager | ₪42,120 | $12,034 |
| Website developer | ₪6,318 | $1,805 |
| Tech/software mentors: | ₪18,720 | $5,349 |
| Marketing | ₪1,000 | $286 |
| Operating costs and misc | ₪3,961 | $1,132 |
| TOTAL | ₪72,119 | $20,605 |
