BloodCare

Inspiration

** You're Somebody's Type!**

The Problem

Many people donate blood on a regular basis but blood has a short shelf life. There is often a large outpouring of blood donations when there are natural disasters. This can create an oversupply of blood which ends up having to be disposed of. On the other hand, hospitals and blood banks will face shortages of blood donations on a more regular basis.

What it does

Blood donors can input their information to see if they are eligible to donate and if their blood type is in demand in their area. This allows people to make their donations more effective by donating when their blood is more likely to be needed.

How I built it

We used HTML, Javascript, Flask, Python, and SQL. The website uses HTML for the forms for user and hospital and input, and uses Javascript to allow Python/Flask to interpret the form data to make the site responsive to users based on their personal information, such as blood type and age. We host the user information and hospital inventories on a SQL database.

Challenges I ran into

Making the forms responsive based on user questions was a challenge. We also did not have any team members who were very experienced with HTML, so creating the website was difficult.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Providing a possible framework to make blood donations more effective and save more lives!

What I learned

We learned a lot about how the system of blood donation works and what challenges exist in the area.

What's next for BloodCare

 BloodCare would like to expand our database worldwide for all hospitals and users to be easily connected. Our expansion is to better encourage the people who are able to donate to give as much as possible when blood shortage is situated. 
 We would create a feature in the future to email users when there is a shortage of their blood type in the area and a donation is needed, instead of users having to sign into the site to check for shortages.
 We would also like to improve our inventory management algorithm to better prepare for natural disaster situations and prevent all biohazardous waste created by the disposal of expired blood samples. We would use past blood inventory data to predict what types of shortages might occur for certain events.