Dose: Eliminating Accidental Drug Overdose Through Technology wins Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Delaware’s At-Large District
Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester has named Varun Vadhera from The Charter School of Wilmington as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in Delaware’s At-Large District.
When asked what inspired the creation of Dose: Eliminating Accidental Drug Overdose Through Technology, the student said, “According to the Congressional App Challenge rules, ‘The app can be on any platform (web app, desktop/PC app, a web browser extension, robot, Ruby on Rails, mobile, etc)’. When I heard this I instantly gravitated towards the robot part of it, and more specifically a medical device. Then after hearing about the opioid epidemic and reading an article about opioid addiction after surgery by Dr. Scott Weiner, MD at Harvard Health, I decided to focus on preventing opioid and other medication overdoses. Then after talking to some family friends who work in the Computer Science field and have had issues with pill management and reminders, I also focussed on making a commercially available product to function as a pill management system and reminder. I then combined the two ideas to make one single product, described in the question above.”
The 2021 Congressional App Challenge yielded 2,101 fully functioning apps. After eighteen months of disruptions to educational cadences for students everywhere, the Congressional App Challenge came roaring back with 7,174 students registering for this year’s competition. All told, 340 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and each winning team is invited to showcase their winning app to Congress during our annual #HouseOfCode festival. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from Omidyar Network, AWS, theCoderSchool, Facebook, Replit, Accenture, and others.
The 2022 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2022, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.