Aviva Canada, tech incubator host community safety hackathon

Aviva Canada is joining forces with start-up accelerator OneEleven to host a hackathon aimed at making Canadian neighbourhoods safer and more connected.

The Safer Neighbourhoods Hackathon will be held from November 23 to 25 at OneEleven’s Toronto office. Developers, insurance professionals, designers, emergency responders, lawyers, and others with brilliant ideas for safer communities are encouraged to register for the event, either individually or as part of a team.

Partners for the event – including representatives from Sidewalk Labs, City of Toronto, and ThinkData Works – will provide participants with mentoring, resources, and data sets to resolve one of three major challenges facing Canadian neighbourhoods:

• Increasing pedestrian-friendly communities and preventing road related injuries/fatalities;
• Preventing distracted driving-related accidents;
• Increasing house-to-house communication for resource, knowledge, and skill sharing.

Three winning teams will be selected to win a total of $7,000. The teams will also be given an opportunity to promote their ideas across Canada using Aviva’s network.

Aviva noted in a release that while technologies and innovations such as autonomous cars, smart homes, AI, and smartphones have made life more convenient, they have also led to growing problems:

• From 2000 to 2008, there were over 6,400 trauma cases in which pedestrians were struck by motor vehicles in Canada.
• According to the City of Toronto, more than 2,000 pedestrians have been severely injured or killed by motor vehicles since 2005.
• Every 30 minutes, someone is injured in a distracted driving-related accident in Ontario.
• Driver distraction is now a major contributing factor in about four million car accidents in North America each year.

“Pedestrian, driver, and neighbourhood safety should be a priority for all Canadians,” said Aviva Canada head of digital innovation Ryan Spinner. “That’s why we decided to partner again with OneEleven to host a hackathon focused on Safer Neighbourhoods.”

“At OneEleven, we bring real solutions to scale,” added OneEleven Toronto managing director Siri Agrell. “We look forward to hosting the Safer Neighbourhoods Hackathon with our partner Aviva Canada and seeing innovative ideas develop into meaningful actions that will improve our city and put technology to use for the greater good.”

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