GeneRx

Inspiration

When brainstorming about potential ideas for ArchHacks, we thought of people in low income housing, and often how expensive brand-name over the counter medicine is, especially in comparison to off-brand generic medicine. As we pursued this idea, we found there aren't really any well-designed, intuitive resources out there for those searching for cheaper alternatives. So, naturally, we thought to try our hand.

What it does

GeneRx takes in whatever drugs you wish to buy and, based off of the IUPAC - more commonly known as active ingredient - finds cheaper, generic alternatives for you to buy instead, while also displaying how much money you'll be saving by the gram. The difference may not seem like much - but it certainly adds up!

Here's the list of currently supported queries:

• advil
• anacin
• goodsense-ibuprofen
• kirkland-acetaminophen
• kirkland-ibuprofen
• members-mark-acetaminophen
• midol
• motrin
• tylenol

How we built it

For our project, we decided to use Firebase for our backend/database and Angular 2/Material2 for the frontend. We also used AngularFire2 to connect the front and back end to each other. The interesting thing about these technologies is that all of them (with the exception of Firebase) was still in-development and in the alpha phase, so it was interesting to experiment with emerging technologies in web app design.

Challenges we ran into

As Angular 2 and Material2 are both in alpha, we found that detailed documentation was hard to come by, and quite a few workarounds were required for our web app to be functional. While we solidified our framework early, we spent a lot of time simply figuring out how to work with what we chose. Not only were some of the features in our framework not fully implemented, some of the fixes had to be found in the GitHub issues for the framework instead of on StackOverflow!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the lack of clear documentation and the various bugs still being worked through, we are quite proud of sticking with our original choice and completing the app with tools still in alpha.

What we learned

Documentation is important! It can be the difference between a few minutes and a few hours of searching.

What's next for GeneRx

As of now, GeneRx stands as more of a proof of concept than anything - as such, in the future we aim to add more medicine, a rating system, user profiles, medicine locators, advertising, and more!

Built With

• angular-2
• angularfire2
• firebase
• git
• javascript
• linux
• material2
• node7
• typescript