DrugSnap

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  Barcode Scanner View

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  Drug Details View

Inspiration

When the guys from AXA pitched their challenge it was made clear to us that there is no shortage of data available to the general public. Yet for ordinary people, healthcare in Switzerland tends to be this enormous obscure conglomerate of insurance companies and hospitals. This disconnect is what inspired us to take a step towards bridging that gap.

What it does

DrugSnap pulls up all relevant medical information on any therapeutical and medical product that is sold in Switzerland. Just by taking a snap of the barcode on the packaging. While working on the project we were made aware of an issue that is mostly relevant to professional athletes: Each year, the list of illegal substances in pro sports is growing and at times, even seemingly harmless products can have career-ending consequences. DrugSnap also lets the user know, which drugs are illegal during sports competitions, or are even banned entirely.

How we built it

We built the backend using the Flask microframework. It serves the requests of the Android app via a strikingly simple REST API. It gets its information from official Swiss healthcare institutions, by means of XML dumps and SOAP APIs.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the datasets are put together in a very inconsistent way. This makes it quite difficult to reliably tell, which potential allergen may be contained in a given pharmaceutical product. For example, some manufacturers might label their data in German, while others do it in French or even Latin. A challenge in developing this solution even further would be to find a way of merging duplicates in these vast datasets.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Considering that there were only two of us, we're quite proud of the amount of ideas that we actually got around to implementing, despite the very limited timeframe.

What we learned

As two electrical engineering students, we've certainly learned that the software world isn't nearly as dull as it might seem from the outside ;)

What's next for DrugSnap

Unfortunately, data on the legality of drugs in pro sports is not available in machine-readable formats. It will be quite a task to fetch the relevant data from the available sources.

Built With

• flask
• kotlin
• python