Four second-year students from the Grand Challenges Living and Learning Community took grand prize honors at a “codeathon” in New York, N.Y.

The competition, which was sponsored by the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Health Matters Initiative, Jawbone, and Tumblr, challenged participants to create an application that would use Jawbone’s UP wristband to reduce stress. The "GTBuzz" team was prepared for this challenge through experience in Grand Challenges, where they do work focused on preventing childhood obesity.

The application, Buzz, connects to a user’s Google calendar and allows the user to give calendar events specific designations such as “test” or “meeting.” The UP wristband then collects data on the user’s sleep patterns and movement throughout the day. Buzz then assigns calendar events “stress scores” to the events based on the health data collected during designated time periods, letting users identify the types of events that cause stress and use stress-reducing techniques accordingly.

GTBuzz team members attributed their success to the cross-disciplinary nature of the team.

“All of the other teams were made up of computer science professionals,” said Patrick Kelly, a second-year business administration major and member of GTBuzz. “We were the only team of students and the only team that had members from different backgrounds. We were successful because we were each able to think about the challenge differently and could offer different opinions about how to design our solution.”

Both the Clinton Foundation and Jawbone have expressed interest in continuing to work with the team to develop Buzz at another competition in January 2014, in addition to supporting the team as it continues work on other Grand Challenges projects.

The Grand Challenges program is a living learning community that began last fall and is open to students of all majors. It tasks participants with finding solutions to worldwide issues related to food, water, energy and heatlh.