Gene and Drive

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  Single-click interface counts shots and gives info about your tolerance

Inspiration

We wanted to build an application that would combine our interest in bioinformatics and software engineering to build a personalized tool. When we saw the Genome Link API, we knew instantly that we wanted to incorporate it into our hack. We talked to the CEO, Tomo, about building an app that wouldn’t just report features but would serve a consistent need unique to the user. As college students and interns, we’ve seen the pervasive use of alcohol at parties and company happy hours. We wanted to create an application to encourage safe drinking, and help users judge when they can drive.

What it does

The application uses the Genome Link API to get the genetic alcohol tolerance of the user. Combined with the physical characteristics of said user, the website predicts how many drinks a user can take to reach different states of intoxication. The user inputs each drink they take so they can keep track of their intoxication throughout the night. The application also estimates how long till the user can drink, and how much more time is added if the user takes another drink. We hope this features will help facilitate responsible drinking.

How we built it

The app interfaces with the Genome Link API through python using Flask. Flask then interfaces with our front-end web application written in HTML/CSS and Javascript to perform calculations and report to the user.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we ran into was building an android application in java. We realized a few hours into the hackathon that there was no good way to interface with the API yet through java so we had to pivot to a web application. We decided to use flask to connect to the API, but we since we had limited web dev experience, we ran into problems with authentication and linking up our backend with flask. Another big challenge was combining genetic tolerance into a formula that would determine state of intoxication, since most papers looked into BAC level rather than genetic tendencies.

We also realized that the Genome link API doesn’t have the information for alcohol tolerance yet so we talked with the CEO about the addition of the feature in the future.

Also, two of our members were bioinformatics majors with limited web app development experience which meant we had to do a lot of quick learning over the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud to have put in a lot of research to make a mostly scientifically accurate app incorporating the Widmark formula and genetic tolerance. We went through a papers and planning before coming up with our final designs. We think the app has a lot of potential to help users plan how much they drink. Furthermore, we hope that the single-click interface is simple and intuitive for inebriated users.

What we learned

We learned how to use flask to interface with the genomelink api. We also learned how to link up our front-end designs with logic written in javascript.

The bioinformatics members learned a lot about front end development including HTML, javascript, and CSS.

What's next for Gene and Drive

A feature we didn’t have time to add was a graph of blood alcohol content. In addition, the Genome link API doesn’t have the information for alcohol tolerance yet so we talked with the CEO about the addition of the feature in the future. We would like to incorporate that when it is released. We would also like to add features on tolerance around eating and alcohol dependence.

Built With

• flask
• genomelink-api
• javascript