HerPath

What inspired us:

Many woman around the world struggle with reproductive health issues, such as PCOS and endometriosis. Especially, due to the stigma around menstruation and problems related to it, many woman do not feel comfortable speaking about or are told that it is "normal" and "just their hormones". We wanted to build a warm and welcoming space to help these woman, with all of sorts of queries they may that they feel uncomfortable speaking about. HerPath is our website, which delivers information on everything to do with reproductive health for a woman and is place for them to find information for the treatments and on going research for these health issues to. However, our main goal and aim is to reduce the time it takes for woman to get professional and clinical help from someone. The NHS and GPs are already working overtime dealing with so many people at once that woman's struggling with menstruation problems gets overlooked or not prioritised enough, which is unfair to those having to deal with such unbearable pain and bleeding that they can continue with their normal routines. Meanwhile, private hospitals are not accessible for everyone and the costs sometimes cause the person not prioritise their own health. This is where 'HerPath' comes in: we want to build a platform that forms this connection between woman and practising gynaecologists, clinicians, pharmacists, who can provide medical advice and researchers and care navigators, who can help discuss and guide their concerns in the best direction or to the best clinician available. We plan to build our revenue through consultation commissions, employer partnerships, university partnerships, pharmacy and healthcare partnerships. We will also introduce a feature to locate the nearest pharmacy or public restroom that can provide free sanitary pads and tampon to woman in the are, who may need it. There will also be an option to text/voice note to the professional you're speaking too and there will be a multilingual services on our website so that woman all across the world in their respective regions.

What we learned:

We learnt how to implement APIs using Gemini API. We also learnt about how revenues work and the importance of critical thinking to evaluate our work properly, by questioning what is missing or what could go wrong with something and how we could correct it or implement a new idea to fix it. As 2 out of 3 members of our team are from none-computing backgrounds, we learnt the value of clear communication to understand the different technical aspects that are required to build a website such as using accurate AI prompts and frameworks like 'Streamlit' and APIs.

How we built our project and the challenges we faced:

We built the projects using Python, Streamlit, Gemini API and Claude for the techincal side, and Canva and ChatGPT for the design side. The main page provides the educational content, which was produced by ChatGPT, but double-checked line by line and cross-referenced with the NHS and other medical websites for accuracy.

Then the main service of the website, which is offer contact to specialised professionals is made up of the Professional Sign Up and Find a Professional pages. The professional sign up page was set up with a secret SQLite database to protect private information and contains a verification process to make sure that there's no misuse of the service.

The other service that our website provides is a map tab, where users can search for places that provide period products for free near them. Our demo only includes, a small area around KCL, which would be expanded, and there is a filtering tab for users to specify their needs and a Gemini API smart search tab for filters to be applied according to the user's request.

One of the challenges we faced is formatting the website design from Canva to the actual website. It included all of the educational content and a sample pages of how our professional page set up will look like. We tried implement our design to the website it was cropping our information and due to the time constraints we were no able to accommodate everything in.