RXchange

Exchange to save and better our lives

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Inspiration

Hydrangea Hack is a socially inclusive hackathon. Our inspiration came from the hackathon itself! A socially inclusive community app where everyone can lean on each other! In our world, we have a thought process, "If you have money, buy it". But due to this mentality, we are repetatively buying resources that sometimes remain unused or get wasted! This is seen in buying long term items like furniture, to perishable items like vegetables and medecines!

Problems addressed: Wastage of Resources and resulting financial imbalance among people, climate change due to increased production load, and many others

One particular case that caught our attention was the bulk buying of medicines. In such times of pandemic, people are prone to get scared and hoard various resource like Covid tablets, masks, medical equipment (yes, yes, even toilet paper). Some of these items, for example the Covid medicine tablets Fabiflu, are used only till the person has Covid! After recovery, such pills are shelved in cozy corners of our homes, never to see the light of day till they are long past their expiry dates! And newer people who get infected by Covid need to buy these resources again, spending double money, when there already were pills available!

We believe that such unintentional/intentional hoarding should be stopped!

We wanted to make an app where people could exchange such resources and ask for them as well!

How are we different?

You might be thinking that its just another donation app. You're wrong! Of course this app CAN be used for donation, but our main focus is on exchange of resources so that no wastage of resources occurs. Why BUY when you can EXCHANGE? Why WASTE when you can PASS IT AROUND!

  • [/] validation of authenticity of the donation process (i.e. Provision of a method to check whether donations are spammed, or material exchange has taken place physically; done by a human community personnel)
  • [/] Consumability of material is validated (i.e. AI system that checks photo of label for expiration date, so that expired products are given)
  • [/] Allow Requests for Materials (i.e. what material is needed in society) so that people can realize their mistake if they have hoarded it

  • [/] We also allow recognized communities to view the donations to their organizations (i.e. logged in people can see how many donations/items-out-for-community there are

    What it does

    RXchange is a platform where users can post in items they want to share/give-away to others. It is an application that is supposed to be used by a community of people living relatively near to each other. It allows users to hand in items that are either perishable (i.e. medicines, food packets, etc) (require users to check whether they are eligible for donation or not using the app's built-in feature), or of long term use (i.e. furniture). These items will be dropped off at a community center by them, where an authorized personnel would tally whether the giving-aways of items has happened real-time or not. The tallied items are then reflected in the app, so that other users in the community can see whether they want the items dropped out. When some user cannot find her/their desired item, she/they can put in a request anonymously, which is displayed on the home page of the app.

  • [/] Login Page -> Login page -> New users can head to Sign Up

    • [/] Home Page -> Requests by users for particular items -> Requests are taken from the request page and displayed here
    • [x] Requests Page -> Users can fill in a form for items they may need, and the amount
    • [/] Support Page -> Users can put out non-perishable items (ie no expiration date items) out into community from this page by filling a form -> For medicine give-away, user clicks on the respective category
    • [/] Expiry-Date Check Page -> Users can click on the Start Scan button and open up a camera window, which automatically clicks photo of the medicine label -> If the label contains expiry date of item, and it doesn't fit the threshold of within 1 week of current day, the item is returned as not usable for give-away -> If the date of expiry is beyond the threshold (i.e. doesn't expire within a week) than the item is returned as usable for give-away
    • [x] Give-away page -> Clicking on any other category would open up a form page wherein users can fill in the item details
    • [x] Community Database page -> Shows all items already given/deposited at the community center. This would be a database which would be controlled by the personnel responsible for tallying the responses in the give-away page with actual turn-overs.

How we built it

  • Using Figma for prototype
  • Using Java in Android Studio for developing the app
  • Using Firebase to connect database.
  • Used Canva for the logo
  • Used Filmora 9 for the video
  • Google cloud play store services for image-to-text

One of use designed the login pages and the related process (details in video). Another one of us developed the image to text applet, which used Google cloud's play store services to run the process on-device. Next, we had to remove esc and spaces in the string and search for a substring having mm/dd/yy pattern. Then all dates (mfd, expiry, etc if visible in label) are compared to current date, and if all fail to pass threshold (ie the condition that date has to be within 1 week of current date), item was deemed unusable. Third and fourth team members worked on unifying the applets together and giving them a common attrative color scheme and UI. Logos were designed using Canva, and a basic model of application was made using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

  • Some of us did not know how to Android Studio before , but with the help of our team mates we were able to learn and complete it
  • We were also of different time zones so coordinating things were a bit harder , but we got it done!
  • Initially we faced issues in pushing the apps to our own github organization, and then combining them to a single app
  • Google has monetized its remote image-to-text tool of ml kit, so finding out the doc for the on-device image-to-text tool proved to be quite difficult. The implementation proved to be quite a nightmare!
  • Extracting dates out of the string received after image-to-text conversion, was quite tricky. At the end we used Pattern in Java to search the string for the date patter (here mm/dd/yy)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a functional app in the span of almost 2 days
  • Coordinating all the work required despite different time zones
  • Unique approach to problem

What we learned

  • how to collaborate on the code together
  • learned more of how to use Android Studio , since only 1 of us were properly familiar with it!
  • how to implement features better
  • how to debug our code in Android Studio better with the help of our mentors

What's next for RXchange

  • We plan to implement more features such as a map to find the nearest donation center
  • We also plan to develop it into a web app
  • Complete the fully functional app as per plan and release it for Public Use!

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