EMA-IOT: Emergency Medical Aid
Winning team at the AT&T 2016 Developer Summit — "Premios 1er Lugar"
The Challenge
The AT&T Hackathon Mexico challenged teams to design and build innovative connected solutions capable of improving people's lives through technology — within a tight competition window.
Our team focused on a problem with clear social urgency: elderly and vulnerable patients who may require rapid medical intervention when critical health conditions arise have no affordable, accessible way to signal distress and automatically reach caregivers.
Every minute of delay in a medical emergency increases risk. We asked: what would it take to reduce that delay to seconds using connected technology?
The Solution — EMA-IOT
We built EMA-IOT (Emergency Medical Aid), a connected health monitoring platform designed to support at-risk patients through continuous vital sign monitoring and automated emergency response.
The platform was designed to:
- Continuously monitor patient vital signs via a wearable device.
- Detect abnormal conditions in real time through threshold analysis.
- Trigger emergency alerts automatically when thresholds are exceeded.
- Notify caregivers and family members through SMS.
- Provide visibility into patient status at any time.
The goal was not to replace medical care — it was to ensure that emergencies were detected and escalated immediately rather than discovered too late.
Architecture
The solution was built as a connected pipeline — from patient-side sensing through data processing to caregiver notification.
My Contributions
As a member of the winning team, my contributions spanned both technical development and delivery:
Application Development
Contributed to the software development of the platform, implementing core application logic and system integration components under hackathon time constraints.
Technical Design
Participated in solution architecture discussions and system design decisions, helping define how the wearable, backend, and notification components connected.
Demo & Presentation
Supported prototype preparation and helped communicate the solution to judges during the competition — including the final international presentation round.
Competition Outcome
Press Coverage
The project received coverage from national and industry publications at the time of the competition.
Lessons Learned
Although the specific technologies used in the prototype have evolved significantly since 2016, the experience reinforced lessons that continue to shape how I approach product development and engineering today.
Career Journey
This award marked an early milestone in a pattern of building technology with measurable social and product impact.