Accelerating Innovation to Jumpstart KC’s Comeback from COVID-19 – Comeback KC Ventures is funded through an 18-month SPRINT Challenge grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration and administered by KC Digital Drive and the UMKC Innovation Center.
KC Digital Drive is hosting an Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) Developer Challenge. The AR/VR Challenge will bring together entrepreneurs, hackers, makers, developers, and other creative minds with the goal of building AR applications that solve local problems.
Contact tracing is critical to containing the spread of coronavirus. Manual contact tracing is a high-touch process managed by public health officials. As the number of confirmed cases in a community rise and sick patients requires more attention, preventative efforts like contact tracing become deprioritized in favor of direct treatment.
In the absence of widely available Covid-19 testing, region-wide KC metro efforts are underway to encourage self-reporting of symptoms and coordinate medical volunteer follow up with symptomatic patients.
When people talk about how emerging technologies might have substantive impact on quality of life, health care is always at the forefront of the conversation. The use of telemedicine to expand access to expertise and services, the explosion of personal data and the quantified self to offer more precise care, the opportunities for massive data integration and analysis to improve system efficiency—all offer tremendous potential.
On a foundation enabled by the Smart Gigabit Communities grant, we’re in the second year of a three-year program that’s built around two goals: building at least two gigabit apps per year, and establishing a Digital Town Square that connects next-generation network resources within the metro area to keep gigabit traffic local and between other gigabit communities.
On November 11th, the Comeback KC Ventures program held its first Innovation Showcase, highlighting 12 entrepreneurs who are developing new products and services in response to COVID-19. The full list of entrepreneurs who presented can be found below, along with a brief description of their solution and a link to a recording of their presentation. […]
KC Digital Drive’s Air Quality Sensors project was recently highlighted as part of MetroLab Network and Government Technology’s Innovation of the Month Series, which highlights impactful tech, data and innovation projects underway between cities and universities. The sensor project is focused on reducing air pollution in COVID-19 hot beds and improving overall air quality using citizen-accessible data and sensors.
In 2020, Children’s Mercy Hospital received an $8.5 million grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to form the Rising T1DE Alliance (RTA), an initiative to improve Type 1 Diabetes care by leveraging predictive analytics to improve inform behavioral care interventions and allow for the iterative testing of alternative care pathways.