FDA DRUG LABELS!?

• 

  Google Calendar Event

Inspiration

The other day when I was taking medicine, I realized that the expiry date was a month away. That made me question, how can we prevent people from taking expired medication? With Medical Errors being the third largest cause of death in the United States according to John Hopkins, I aimed to tackle this issue.

What it does

My code asks the user to take a photo of the FDA drug label. It then asks for the expiry date and reads through the label to search for side effects. It then provides a list of links for tackling those side effects and creates a Google Calendar event to throw away the medication after it expires.

How we built it

The code was built using the Python language along with the use of OpenCV, PyTesseract, and Google Calendar API. Further detailed information on the libraries and sources used, can be found on GitHub ReadMe.

Challenges we ran into

The Google API had authentication errors that took quite a bit of StackOverflow help to solve. OpenCV and PyTesseract were having issues with locating some files. For that, I had to go through the documentation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting PyTesseract to work and being able to optimize the thresholding and learning more about it.

What we learned

I have learned a lot about the Google Calendar API and PyTesseract and look forward to working more with them in the future!

What's next for FDA DRUG LABELS!?

I could not find a database for the drug label warnings and the suggestions the FDA provides for them, but if there is such a DB, I would like to implement that into the build as well. I believe that this can be extended to applications in clinical trials so that users get calendar updates to self-administer medications and note their experience on a form that has been linked to the Google Calendar event.

Built With

• google-calendar
• opencv
• pytesseract
• python