Diabetes 360

Inspiration

Nitin's dad was recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and Nitin noticed that it was hard to keep track of medications and other healthy habits that can help treat diabetes. Patients like his dad would often forget to take medication or struggle with knowing how to start making serious lifestyle changes. The goal of this app is to help people like Nitin's dad live easier and healthier lives, and approach a sensitive subject with a little humor, allowing patients to feel comfortable with themselves.

What it does

The web app essentially acts as an all in one hub for all things Diabetes related. It has an activity tracker where patients can log their workouts, a health dashboard where patients can keep track of their vitals, a medication section so patients don't forget to take their meds, and most impressively of all, an AI-generated healthy meal planner to get patients on track to meet healthy eating goals.

How we built it

We built the base of the web app using a React Next.js framework, leveraging integrations with a MongoDB backend to store info on medications, exercise, and patient vitals. We hosted both the website and the backend using AWS cloud servers. In addition, we used the Gemini API to create personalized meal plans for patients which they can repeatedly request and alter according to their dietary preferences.

Challenges we ran into

While the front-end came along smoothly, we had significant issues with our backend system. We initially created a local backend and locally hosted the MongoDB database but quickly realized that wasn't working since authentication only worked for one of our computers. We tried other strategies like hosting onto AWS cloud servers, but nothing seemed to work.

At that point, we decided to overall and redo the entire database from scratch at 1AM and host it AWS's cloud servers, spending the next 6 hours ensuring that the database worked well and accurately stored critical medical data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It goes without saying that we're proud of all we've learned and are proud of having stuck through our first hackathon. But beyond that, we're proud of how we came together and stayed up late into night without any friction. We're proud of the perseverance we showed even when we had to face the daunting task of redoing our entire database. We might be proud of our results, but we're more proud of ourselves and each other as people.

What we learned

Each of us focused on a different part of the project. Pierre focused on the backend, Nitin focused on the frontend, and Caleb focus on AI and database integration. So we each got deeper knowledge on all of those subjects but also, by working with each other, we got to learn about the details of other parts of the production workflow, becoming not only better coders, but better teammates as a result.

What's next for Diabetes 360

We don't know what the future holds, but we'd certainly love to see Diabetes-360 become a widely used product and are certainly open to continuing work this project in the future. We're looking to add even cooler features like a more advanced patient dashboard, predictive analytics for diabetes prognosis and development, and text/email reminders for meals, workouts, and medicines.