CheckUp

We are submitting to the Health track.

Inspiration

We were inspired by the alarming rise in coronavirus cases in the United States. One consequence of this pandemic is that seeing a doctor for in-person checkups has become much more difficult and risky. Currently, doctors have fews ways to assess the risk of a patient spreading coronavirus before coming for a visit. We wanted to create an app that would protect both healthcare workers and patients by collecting symptom data daily prior to an appointment.

What it does

CheckUp allows doctors to monitor patients for coronavirus symptoms before and after an appointment. Doctors can assign patients to complete a daily symptoms form up to a scheduled date and view the patient’s data. CheckUp uses a login system to keep data secure and facilitate communication between healthcare providers and patients.

How we built it

We developed the front end of our iOS app using the storyboard in Xcode. This was integrated using Swift into the back end through Google’s Firebase mobile development platform in order to manage user authentication and data storage and transfer between users.

Challenges we ran into

We were all new to iOS app development, so we had a pretty slow start while figuring out how to use Xcode, Swift, and Firebase. The biggest challenge we faced was using Git to merge changes. It was difficult to resolve conflicts and navigate through different branches, but ultimately we were able to work through it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of being able to link up the front-end and back-end successfully to access the database directly from the application. We’re also proud of how we designed the UI to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

What we learned

We gained a lot of experience in coding in Swift and using Firebase, as well as with developing iOS applications. We learned the many steps involved with creating a user-friendly product completely from scratch, from brainstorming features to implementing them collaboratively and optimizing the user experience.

What's next for CheckUp

We’d like to expand CheckUp’s functionality to offer doctors more flexibility in how they monitor their patients. For instance, the doctor could create a customizable form to track symptoms for diabetes, asthma, or other conditions. We also hope to add a chat function to allow doctors and patients to communicate back and forth. This would be implemented in conjunction with push notification support in order to notify patients for an upcoming appointment, for completing their symptom monitoring form and for incoming messages from their doctor.