Amello

An SMS messaging system to provide digital medical resources in the developing world, all without internet access.

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Inspiration

We were inspired to create Amello through our extensive research into the problems faced in sub-Saharan Africa. When researching, we realized that a significant portion of the common fatal medical conditions there were preventable. We found it absurd that an estimated 1.6 million people died from respiratory disease, caused by the toxic fumes trapped in their households from burning solid fuels. These issues seemed so ridiculous to us in the developed world, but are currently the norm in developing areas. This needs to change.

What it does

Amello provides digital health resources to people in developing countries via sms text messaging (so it's accessible without wifi access). There are 3 facets included in Amello

  1. A symptom checker, which prompts the user with a series of questions and uses a machine learning model to assess what disease they have
  2. A clinic finder, which provides the user the location of the clinic closest to them, which they can go to when Amello recommends it
  3. A handbook for users to be able to access on demand information on a variety of health topics, such as hygeine and sanitation

How we built it

Since this project is centered around users who don't necessarily have internet access, we focused on designing sms mockups and coding a method to match user inputted symptoms with an open source symptom-disease database from Kaggle in Python

Challenges we ran into

  • Our limited technical programming knowledge was a barrier to achieving a functioning Amello mockup. We had trouble successfully matching up user inputted symptoms to their corresponding diseases, but we know what requirements would be needed to accomplish that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to ideate and concisely present an idea that targets a major problem in the developing world; higher death rates due to lack of health awareness. We setup multiple feedback sessions with staff and speakers at the hackathon in order to validate our idea, and we stayed on schedule.

What we learned

We learned more about mobile phone usage sub-Saharan Africa, how to make mockups, and how to use Kaggle datasets.

What's next for Amello

  • Creating higher fidelity mockups that can match symptoms with diseases
  • Connecting with already successful telemedicine companies to gain access to more data that could help increase Amello's effectiveness
  • Meeting the people that Amello serves, and observe their lifestyle and their needs to figure out how to best optimize the service for them

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