A religious festival might not seem to be the most likely launching pad for the latest app, but a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology saw India’s Kumbh Mela as fertile ground for testing out digital innovations, including ones with potential life-saving value.

Apps for the pop-up city germinated at another kind of pop-up event: a 72-hour hackathon called “Kumbhathon,” hosted at MIT over the winter. There, teams of programmers finalized what they’d test at the Mela, including a digital map of the festival grounds, a festival-specific Wikia, and a “crowd-steering” app that helped pilgrims avoid the trampling incidents and other safety hazards of past festivals.

The hackathon also saw the creation of two health apps aimed at finding and treating ill or injured festivalgoers and reducing the spread of illness among them.

The first, Epimetrics, was a “real-time epidemic outbreak monitoring system.” The app provided a way for clinicians to enter medical information on patients who showed signs of infectious disease, such as fever and diarrhea, and who consented to have their data shared. Clinicians were also able to view a web-based dashboard that summarized cases across the Kumbh Mela population and displayed them on a map. This permitted insight into the sources and spread of disease, enabling clinicians to practice what the MIT crew calls “precautionary and predictive healthcare.” The Epimetrics trial at Kumbh Mela didn’t include test results or identifying specific viruses and bacteria; when patients needed care beyond what on-site clinicians could provide, they were referred to local hospitals.

The second app, Meditracker, helped people in need find a hospital. An Android app designed for the average citizen, Meditracker existed to deliver information on the locations of local clinics and hospitals to the many Kumbh Mela visitors unfamiliar with the area.

The app also offered first aid advice, including a list of over-the-counter medication useful for treating minor injuries and illnesses. Perhaps best of all, the download also incorporated a valuable one-touch emergency-calling widget. A huge boon in a country with limited ambulance access and few maps, the widget made use of the MIT group’s other map-based projects to pinpoint the locations of injured or ill people. It also alerted the festival’s medical staff to patients’ need for help.

MIT isn’t releasing data gathered at the 2015 Kumbh Mela or the number of total users it had. With the apps just emerging from what Church calls “the spot-and-probe phase, where we’re generating ideas and a culture of innovation,” this year was largely about proofs of concept for future development.

That said, advancement appears likely. Although a launch at a two-month-long public event doesn’t guarantee any app will last, MIT’s Kumbhathon has already done an admirable job of avoiding creating “vaporware” (the hastily announced, short-lived products that hackathons sometimes create). And Church is confident that the apps will prove useful beyond this year’s Mela. “After seeing the successes of what happened, I think we have a better understanding of what [projects] would be long-term,” she says.