Assignment 1: Brainstorming Ideas and 1-Minute Madness Presentation

 

Goal

To get you thinking about problems and opportunities in healthcare from a new perspective, and to give you an opportunity to practice idea generation and pitching those ideas to others in short presentations that will help the entire class to get creative ideas flowing.

Individual assignment

 

Do the assigned reading, which includes a document on tips for giving presentations. Then, develop three concepts for the use of Android Wear, Google Glass, Amazon Echo, a bicycle simulator, or some other advanced user interface technology to change healthcare, health, or health research as we know it. Think big and out of the box, as discussed in Class 1. Think crazy, in the good way. Target high risk, high payoff ideas. Don't just think about death or disease, but all the other aspects of health discussed in Class 1 that could benefit from more attention. Be realistic ... remember we want to build something that actually works and that could be tested. The ideas must focus on person- or patient-facing systems (i.e., personal health informatics), as discussed in class.

 

The idea must fall into one of the following categories, and all ideas should have an NU focus:

 

You must generate three ideas. You can only have one idea from each category, however. You might want to develop more than 3 ideas, but pick the best 3 to turn in. Your ideas should not be variations of the same idea. They should be three, quite distinct, ideas.

 

Next, develop an "elevator pitch" for each of the ideas. Each pitch will be a 1-minute presentation describing that idea to the rest of the class as best as you can. Your goal is to convince the class that you have come up with a great idea ... innovative, creative, appropriate for mobile devices, useful, engaging, addictive, buildable in the span of a semester, etc. You may not have enough information yet about the technology platform you chose (e.g., Google Glass, smartwatches, bike simulator, smartphone, Echo) to really do this, but give it a shot anyway. In short, after each minute pitch, try to leave us thinking, "Wow! What a great idea! Why didn't I think of that?"

 

Submit your ideas by the deadline the day before class.

 

You will present one or more of your ideas in class as part of our 1-Minute Madness Idea Pitch session in Class 2. Be prepared to present all three.

 

In the class we will use a variant on Petcha Kucha for presentations. You will present using timed slides using a particular format. For this assignment, you must develop each of your ideas (3 slides per idea) using this template.

 

Hand in:

 

Email your slides as a single PPT file named PHIDD-[YourFirstName][YourLastName].1mm.ppt to ...@neu.edu by the deadline.

 

Note that you are absolutely not committing yourself to these particular ideas in any way. Your goal in this exercise is to come up with a great idea that others will be enthusiastic about and make a strong 1 minute pitch for good ideas. This is the start of a process to help you (and then your eventual team) come up with an idea that is truly outstanding.

 

The ideas and presentation should reflect that students have put significant thought into this brainstorming and in preparing the pitch to make the case for the quality of the idea.

 

You are not being evaluated on the idea itself, but you will be evaluated on evidence that you have done the reading, thought carefully about the ideas you generated, worked hard to present the ideas in a clear and compelling way, and practiced your presentation.