The winners of the first 4EU+ Urban Health Case Challenge
On Friday 27 November, the participating teams of the first ever 4EU+ Urban Health Case Challenge presented their solutions in front of a jury and the winners were announced. The first price went to Team 12 from Sorbonne University, second price to Team 2 from University of Warsaw and third price to Team 7 from Uppsala University.
On 23-27 November 2020, the 4EU+ University Alliance and the School of Global Health at University of Copenhagen hosted the first ever 4EU+ Urban Health Case Challenge (UHCC). 14 teams from eight European cities competed to come up with the best solution to the challenge on community resilience in times of COVID-19. Due to the pandemic everything happened online, even the collaboration within the teams, as most cities across Europe were and are under various forms of lock-downs.
UHCC was launched to address the many urban changes in relation to health and demographic transformation in our growing urban environments. Due to the worldwide COVID-19 crisis, this year’s case question – posed by the company Gehl - was:
- In your city, design a community intervention that strengthens resilience among vulnerable populations to overcome negative implications of COVID-19 preventive measures
Teams were made up of students with various disciplines and from different programs at Heidelberg University (Germany), Charles University (Czech Republic), University of Milan (Italy), Sorbonne University (France), University of Warsaw (Poland), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), Uppsala University (Sweden) and Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway).
The top three teams to emerge victorious were:
First place: Team 12 from Sorbonne University (Inna Ndaw, Paul-Dao Zhang, Robin Guelimi, Racim-Ilyas Bouhmila, Aleksandar Mitrevski)
with their solution “HealthKit" - a box composed of everything patients and doctors need for an efficient online consultation, with the purpose offering a better and safer medical teleconsultation.
Second place: Team 2 from University of Warsaw (Andrzej Krasnodębski, Weronika Caban, Michał Żebrowski, Agnieszka Chmura, Marta Brewer)
with their solution “ALLOTMENTal Health” - an intervention for the citizens of Warsaw, focusing on senior citizens, that uses the available infrastructure to create additional green space for safe human interaction, with the purpose of combatting social isolation and increase the amount of green space available in Warsaw.
Third place: Team 7 from Uppsala University (Neda Safa, Regina Escher, Nicole Quattrini, Annette Ekblom, Qianhui Yuan)
with their solution “Grand-Pal System” - a buddy-system in Uppsala city, in which students are teamed up with an elderly to initially establish a communication channel and in the long-term arrange meet-ups in order to combat social isolation and loneliness amongst elderly in Uppsala.