Synapse Match wins Rep. Mark DeSaulnier’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 10th District

When asked what inspired the creation of Synapse Match, the students said, “Only a few weeks into the school year, our physics teacher—Mr. C—announced a surprise diagnosis of Parkinson’s in his left hand. He became one of over 11 million people diagnosed in the world today. But more jarring than the diagnosis was just how abrupt it was. We had already spent over a month with him through the summer, but never noticed any sign of anything out of the ordinary. We felt powerless to help someone who, despite his condition, helped us every single day. 

“In response to our new circumstances, the class watched and shared online videos to better understand and reason with everything that had just happened. One of the group members stumbled upon an interview created by the Parkinson’s Foundation. Sifting through it, a quote by interviewee Dr. Kathleen Blake stood out to us:

‘I probably had symptoms for a total of 12 years before I got diagnosed…people never forget being told: you have Parkinson’s…period.” She furthered that these late alerts happen incredibly often for patients and affect caregiver families who have no way of regularly screening their symptoms.’ 

“Her words directed our project. If we had the potential to use everyday technology in order to identify symptoms a decade ahead, it meant providing a decade’s worth of help.

“We aimed to identify applications with similar focuses and modify them to assist others. The most credible and open applications we used, however, couldn’t meet patient needs. Especially smart watches, which regularly missed the mark and oversimplified data. When tinkering with public applications, we often found that their measurement tools were too tedious to re-use, and most apps tested symptoms that Mr. C simply didn’t actually have. In response, we went back to the drawing board and delved even deeper into researching the most holistic process. Thereby, finalizing our goal: creating an app that could test multiple symptoms at once, using only the phone to measure metrics. 

“The more we questioned, the more inspired our team became. From then on, we knew our initiative to predict Parkinson’s disease had a chance to impact not only Mr. C but countless others, on a national scale.”