FarmerHealth

Inspiration

Rural farmers face health risks: pesticide exposure, machinery injuries, zoonotic diseases, that generic health apps don’t cover. We built FarmerHealth so farmers get information tailored to their work.

What it does

FarmerHealth offers three tools for US farmers: (1) a risk summary by farm type (crop, livestock, dairy, etc.), (2) a chat-based symptom checker that asks about recent farm work and suggests next steps (monitor, urgent care, ER, call 911), and (3) a first aid guide for farm emergencies (pesticides, chemical splash, heat stroke, machinery injury, animal bites).

How we built it

React frontend with MUI, Express + TypeScript backend, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini for the risk summaries and symptom checker. First aid content is stored in static JSON and served via REST endpoints.

Challenges we ran into

Gemini’s free tier quota ran out during development, so we switched to OpenAI. We also had to handle port conflicts and environment variable loading order so the API key was available when the backend started.

Accomplishments we're proud of

Plain-language, farm-specific health content; a symptom checker that guides users to the right care level; clear separation of backend and frontend so the app stays stateless and easy to deploy.

What we learned

Rural health tools need to speak to farmers’ daily work and environment. AI works well for this when prompts are clear and outputs are kept in plain language.

What's next for FarmerHealth

Foreign language support, caching for risk summaries, PWA/offline mode for the first aid guide, and integrations with regional health resources or extension services.

Built With

• express.js
• mui
• react
• tailwind