Today marked the first day of MIT’s Health and Wellness Innovation 2013, a two-week hackathon where participants with diverse backgrounds and skills convene at the MIT Media Lab to rapid prototype patient-oriented healthcare technologies. Each year is an opportunity for us to work with groups comprised of some of academia’s brightest minds and companies like Motorola, Phillips, Novartis, Hallmark, and GlaxoSmithKline. This year, 80 participants and 6 participating companies are working to tackle healthcare issues related to HIV, congestive heart failure, epilepsy, Parkinson’s Disease, hypertension, and perioperative care.

Glass Ink Media is excited to be working this year with such innovative minds on these important healthcare issues. This is Glass Ink’s third year as the event’s video production provider, and every year, we’ve found that the activity presents fun and unique challenges that really put our creativity–and efficiency—to the test. Each group has just two weeks to conceptualize, plan, and prototype their ideas, and at the end of those two weeks, it’s our job to create a multi-purpose video that demonstrates the group’s prototypes, and how it helps the patient. It’s video production at a break-neck speed—we shoot six videos in two days, during the small window of time after final presentations and before participants leave town. So, much like the activity is an experience in rapid-prototyping for the participants, creating their demos is an experience in rapid-video production for us.

But however challenging, we’re pleased and honored to provide our services. The videos serve as a way for participants to show to their companies and universities what they accomplished during the activity, and many groups use the videos as fund-raising and recruiting tools to continue the projects into the future (to check out some videos from previous Health and Wellness activities, visit: http://www.youtube.com/newmediamed

Though the next couple weeks will be busy, we hope to share exciting developments from this year’s event. Stay tuned!