Team from Storm Technology Wins Atlantec 2025 AI Challenge with NeuroKind App
A team from Storm Technology won the Atlantec 2025 AI Hackathon Challenge, impressing judges with their mobile app, NeuroKind, that helps parents and caregivers support emotional regulation for neurodivergent children, generating personalised, calming communication scripts to help them navigate daily routines.
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On Friday, the 16th of May 2025, a team of IT professionals from Storm Technology took home first place at the Atlantec 2025 AI Challenge. Hosted as part of the itag Atlantec Festival ‘Shaping the Future of Technology Innovation’, the one-day hackathon brought together tech enthusiasts, innovators, and industry leaders across Galway. To participate in the challenge, each team had to design, prototype and pitch AI-driven solutions that aligned with Ireland’s National AI strategy of fostering innovation, ethical AI, and positive societal impact.
Harnessing AI for Good
Wanting to make a meaningful impact in the areas of education and accessibility, the team from Storm Technology focused their efforts on supporting emotional regulation in neurodivergent children, particularly those with a Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) profile. After a series of brainstorming sessions, the team created NeuroKind, a mobile application that leverages generative AI to assist parents and caregivers in crafting calm, personalised communication strategies.
Understanding The Challenge
For the first iteration of NeuroKind, the team chose to focus on a very specific and often misunderstood neurodivergence profile—Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA). PDA relates to a nervous system response where everyday requests feel threatening, leading to avoidance, resistance or meltdowns. Through conversations with parents and caregivers in the local community, the team learned just how challenging day-to-day communication can be for parents of children with this profile. For some, even simple asks like “brush your teeth” could provoke a strong negative reaction.
Aoife, a parent and friend of a team member, shared that she had started using ChatGPT to help craft declarative language, which uses comments, statements or observations rather than commands or direct instructions, to help ease transitions between daily activities. While this approach was helpful, it also came with limitations such as repeated re-typing, constantly updating prompts with new context and overall frustration with the lack of continuity.
This real-world insight helped shape the concept behind NeuroKind, a tool that could reduce this daily stress and empower parents and caregivers to navigate difficult moments more smoothly.
Introducing NeuroKind
NeuroKind acts as a calm, neuro-affirming virtual assistant that remembers your child and delivers personalised support for managing daily routines. Parents and caregivers can create a child profile within the app, entering information on communication preferences, sensory sensitivities, motivators, and triggers to produce more personalised declarative language.
With the click of a button, the app generates custom scripts to help with transitions, like getting ready for school or winding down at bedtime, tailored to the child’s needs and context. The app, built using Python, React and Azure OpenAI, features a simple, user-friendly interface and received positive early feedback from parents who said it could help reduce conflict without compromising structure.
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A Winning Formula
On the day of the hackathon, the team from Storm technology worked alongside 17 other teams, refining their demo and perfecting their pitch with support from the itag mentors.
Speaking on winning the hackathon, Eamon Keane, Senior Software Engineer at Storm Technology, noted, ‘We didn’t do anything groundbreaking, but what we did was lean on the technology that’s already available to us, like generative AI, listen to users feedback, and apply it to a very specific use case’.
Tomás Breen, Technical Delivery Practice Manager at Storm Technology, added ‘The project was able to show that modern AI tools can have a really big impact with a little amount of effort, which is especially important in areas of society such as education and caregiving that are already underfunded. There is huge potential to extend an app like this to many other use cases, for example, a special needs assistant (SNA) at school could use the app to create a profile for each child to help support smooth transitions throughout the school day'.
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NeuroKind is just one example of how AI can be harnessed for meaningful social impact, echoing the main premise of Atlantec’s AI Challenge 2025. The team will present their winning project at the Atlantec conference on Thursday, the 29th of May, the final day of the Atlantec festival.
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