Donating blood just got a whole lot easier. Yep, there’s no excuse anymore. Ryan Leckie ’09 and his business partner, Jakub Straka, have developed Blood Type Bots (www.bloodtypebots.com), an application that connects blood donors and hospitals through chat bots.
It’s simple. Blood Type Bots monitors hospital blood supplies in real time and notifies donors (via Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, or Hangouts) when they are near a hospital in need of their specific blood type. It even sends them directions to the hospital.
Leckie and Straka began their startup while attending Miami Ad School Europe in Hamburg, Germany. Earlier this year, the pair won the 2018 Interactive Innovation Award in Student Innovation at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas. The pair has built a functioning prototype of the system, and there’s already a lot of interest to develop it further, including conversations with a blood donation center that operates in 31 states.
“Jakub and I are really excited about the potential impact Blood Type Bots will have when it comes to saving lives,” Leckie says.