Kingston student designs a new innovative app for the NHS

A Kingston student has started working with a software company in London after coming up with a new app targeted at the NHS, which aims to help patients with heart issues.

Nursing student Leanne Goode, 29, came up with an app idea to enable electrocardiogram (ECG) machines to produce information digitally.

ECG’s help doctors and nurses to measure patients’ heart rhythm as well as identifying whether there are any issues of irregularities with their heartbeat.

Goode said: “When you take an ECG, the results don’t get stored on a database which doesn’t make any sense, and you also have to get a doctor sign it off.

“It seemed like a waste of time, so the idea was to get the ECG online in order to make the process faster.”

The app would save nurses a lot of time as it eliminates them having to find a doctor to sign the ECG – a time-consuming activity.

Doctors would also be alerted to any irregularities through a pop-up which would allow them to know if there was an issue with a patient.

She added: “The app is in the planning stages at the moment, but we are all chipping in, having meetings and talking about how to make it better.”

Goode was allowed to design the app after attending one of Kingston University’s Hackathon events.

The event brought together 200 students, health professionals and tech enthusiasts, and the nursing student was keen to advise others about attending such events as the outcomes can be highly beneficial.

Kingston Hackathon events run most weeks in term time with varied subjects and also sometimes features business or external organisations in to set challenges for students.

Goode said: “An email was sent through about the Hackathon event and my friends and I decided to go.

“We teamed up with computer science students in order to think of a gap in the NHS and pitched our idea at the end.

“The experience was well worth it, not only because we didn’t know it would result in the app being developed, but because it gave us the opportunity to meet other students at Kingston.”

Goode and her team won the main award and, along with another winning team, have gained the opportunity to work with Alphalake AI to develop their projects into a reality.

Dr Martha Mador, head of enterprise education at Kingston, said: “Alphalake brought 20 people from the NHS in and spent the day talking to these students and helped them think of ideas.

“They are now very interested in supporting the development of some of these ideas, and we’re also talking to them about placements for computer science students.

“It was great to get the nursing students together in order to give them an insight into what technology can do in their context.

“Technology is incredibly important to improve our NHS services.”