Amnesia

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Inspiration

We were inspired to create Amnesia after learning about the drastically increasing year-over-year spending on prescription medicine. In fact, in 2014 Americans spent over $340 billion in this industry. Unfortunately, there's a severe lack of transparency and 1:1 pricing in the market, and therefore many Americans purchase products without cross-shopping for the best price or considering generic alternatives.

What it does

Amnesia allows the user to easily manage their medical prescription expenses throughout the year. As users upload receipts, it uses computer vision technology to automatically read and save that data into their spending habits. It then suggests potentially cheaper alternatives to save money on the product for repeating purchases. It also understands how often the user refills particular prescriptions, sending alerts ahead of time with the cheapest option available of that particular drug.

How we built it

Amnesia is built using Swift for the iOS Application. The Tesseract OCR library was used to parse the text from a pharmacy receipt. The backend API that powers the application was built in Ruby on Rails with a PostgreSQL database, deployed via Heroku's Cloud service.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was using tesseract's OCR library to properly read the text off of the receipt. After that, we had to figure out how to build a robust, fault-tolerant backend API.