Inspiration
For this project, we were inspired by having our first year and a half of school being online. We found it difficult to manage all the different revenues of information and platforms used for communication, and we felt that it could be streamlined and improved upon. One place for all communication; one place to make university more accessible and manageable.
What it does
Forus provides users with an affordable, accessible, and scalable method of sharing rich content. Users can create pseudonymous accounts, from which they may contribute to "channels" of content via posts.
How we built it
Forus uses the Svelte framework for its UI components, and in order to manage the decentralized database where encrypted content is stored, we used the gun.js library. The database uses WebRTC technology to distribute information across a P2P browser network.
Challenges we ran into
As with any project of this nature, there were many challenges we ran into along the way. The first one happened pretty much right off the bat, the fact that none of us knew the software that we were using! After spending far too much time watching tutorials and reading various documentation, we finally felt that we had overcome our first hurdle. The second challenge, that was really out of our hands. was the fact that one of our teammates was in British Columbia and the time difference made it really hard to collaborate to the best of our abilities on this project. However through clear communication and a dedicated work either we were able to work through that! Overall, while we had quite a few challenges along the way, the experience was still fun and rewarding nevertheless!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are a team of one intermediate coder and two novice coders so even doing this project felt like a huge accomplishment for us. We also decided to use two platforms that were completely new to all of us. We definitely had a huge learning curve in this project and it feels so satisfying that we managed to create a project and have while doing it!
What we learned
We learned a lot during the course of this project, as we used two new-to-us platforms. In addition to learning these platforms, we also learned valuable skills in planning, communication, and time management. With one of our members being across the country with a three hour time difference, all of these skills were paramount to the success of this project.
What's next for Forus
We see the future of this project revolutionizing telehealthcare. The forum format allows for and individual’s healthcare team to all be in one place, and for all of their input to be recorded and accessible. In addition to a forum with a patient’s whole healthcare team, individual forms can be in place with specific practitioners. The beauty of this platform: you can do it all from one place.
In the future, we will implement more security features to ensure confidentiality is supported in a healthcare environment, such as secret keys to be used for encrypting sensitive data in channels.
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