(7 Dec 2015, Toronto) JMIR Publications is proud to announce the creation of a new platform and journal for innovators and organizations seeking solutions and trying to stimulate innovation: JMIR Challenges.

The platform is now open for submissions from solution seekers or "sponsors" of a challenge or an award/prize.

Do you have a problem or question for the worlds' leading health innovators? For example, are you looking for software wireframes, blueprints, behavior change architectures, workflows, ideas or feedback from experts in the field, or do you need a piece of software development or software architecture outsourced? Or do you have an open dataset or big data resource and looking for experts to analyze the data? Do you want to sponsor a monetary or non-monetary prize/award for compelling solutions for a pressing public health problem? Is your research or development stuck because you need input from a broader community? JMIR has a network of over 60.000 potential problem-solvers and idea generators: eHealth researchers and health experts, e-patients, leaders and innovators, including the top scientists in the fields of informatics, behavioral sciences, mental health, serious games, mHealth, ubiquitous computing, human factors, bioinformatics and biotechnology (sign up here). JMIR Challenges is a new platform connecting "solution-seekers" (sponsors) (companies, or other researchers) with "solution-providers" (entrants) (innovators, researchers, developers in the ehealth space).

Solution seekers submit a competition document (template here) specifying what they are looking for, the prize/award, and the detailed rules of the competition including evaluation process and criteria. After an internal review, JMIR Challenges will publish the competition document (the solution seeker can remain anonymous, if requested).

In response to the competition document, solution-providers will start submitting their solutions (documents e.g. with a description of their ideas or wireframes, multimedia files, software code) to the JMIR Challenges platform. Solution seekers can review the submissions and/or subject them to additional peer-review through their judges, selection panel or external reviewers (JMIR can help finding reviewers). At the end of the process, the solution-seeker will select winning submissions.

The solution seeker or solution provider may decide to publish the entries on the challenges platform or not (JMIR Challenges may eventually be PubMed-indexed).

JMIR is the administrator of the competition and will make sure that the prize money will be distributed as per the competition rules.

Examples for possible competitions / challenges are:

$100,000 Challenge to find a solution for ...

$1,000 Prize for the best actual or potential use case of device XY (e.g. Google Glass) in health care

$5,000 Award to develop a questionnaire or method to measure adoption of XY

$10,000 Challenge develop wireframes and an algorithm for an app for XY patients

$5,000 Challenge to develop a research protocol to evaluate XY

$10,000 Challenge for an open source code for an mhealth app that does XY

... to develop behavior change text messages for XY

... to review and synthesize the literature on XY

... to develop strategies to improve the use of / adherence to XY

... to evaluate the usability of XY

... to analyze the dataset Z and find an algorithm to predict a certain variable

... to find new patterns and regularities in big dataset Z

... to provide ideas for how to analyze dataset Z

... to hacking challenge: see if individuals in an anonymized dataset Z can be re-identified (or proof proper de-identification)

... to find a solution for public health problem XY

X Award for the most influential ...

X Prize for the most compelling ....

$1,000 JMIR Challenge for the best 3D Printdesign for a health care device or educational model (this is an actual forthcoming competition, monitor JMIR Challenges for the competition announcement)

$1,000 JMIR Patient Award for the best 3D Printdesign from an MRI scan showing a diseased organ (this is an actual forthcoming competition, monitor JMIR Challenges for the competition announcement)

For a template for a competition document and submission guidelines see Author Guidelines.

There are no costs for the first challenges hosted on JMIR Challenges.

Original Paper