The story so far
Pre-FatigueHACK
The FatigueM8 story started in February 2018, when Andrew spotted an advert in a the weekly news email from the Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) as pictured below.
In the lead up to receiving the email, Andrew and Kelvin (now co-founders) had been discussing opportunities to participate in Hackathons. When the opportunity to compete in the FatigueHACK in the ACT they assembled a team of KJR Canberra staff members, along with a group of our partners from the local IT community. A few names were bounced around and we settled on “Augmented Intelligence”.
In researching before the FatigueHACK we developed a thesis that we could use Electrocardiogram (ECG) observations to identify fatigue; and ultimately using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and the power of the cloud be able to predict the onset of fatigue.
Heading into the FatigueHACK we had many unsolved and unanswered questions – first and foremost, how would we capture the ECG from the driver? would the drivers embrace the collection of ECG? and a whole host of other questions.
The FatigueHACK
The FatigueHACK was conducted over three (3) days, and included a series of work shops, informal and formal conversations, presentations and pitches, from both participants of the Hackathon and mentors from the trucking industry. The days were jammed packed to say the least.
Each of the teams progressed through several pitching rounds, developing and refining their respective ideas. A large part of the FatigueHACK was validating each of the ideas with the trucking community that were in attendance. In our case, we spoke to many of the attendee’s and tested everything from our implementation to the information we’d give the driver.
The final pitch took place in front of the whole Trucking Australia conference attendee’s (over 300) on the main stage. The top three (3) teams pitched and the crowd voted for the winner.
Each of the teams was given a five (5) minute slot, with questions held until all of the teams had pitched. The crowd vote was so close it went to a photo finish! Fortunately for the Augmented Intelligence won by a handful of votes 🙂
Post Hackathon
At the time we won, Kelvin addressed the crowd and said “we won’t be spending the prise money at the bar, we’ll be using it for further research…” and he was 100% correct. We’ve stretched the $6,000 in prise money a long way!
Since the FatigueHACK we’ve captured snippets of our journey in our blog and you can read all about the ups and downs of the start-up life here:
