Grow Your Health: An expandable app for virtual healthcare

Inspiration

Our application was inspired by our own grandparents' struggles with current apps. Many times they open the application and immediately become overwhelmed by all of the menus and options. Grow Your Health allows the health care provider to enable and disable features to create a focus around what's really important. Thus, a user like Mary or Robert from the listed user personas would be able to have just a few buttons to tap in order to log information for their providers to see. If they have some sort of listening device like a smart speaker, they would be able to simply say their logged information and just need the phone or tablet to confirm that the information was added.

What it does

Phase I implementation of this application would consist of creating an interface that allows users to add diet, activity, and medication components. There would only be two options, add and delete, to simply the interface for the user. Phase II would flush out the rest of the "petals" of the application's flower structure, allowing for doctor's appointment reminders, lab results, and mental health resources to be accessed. Phase III of development would begin to offer more features that could be enabled but would not be default for most users. This would allow users, as they become more comfortable with the software, to begin to log and track more of their health information, putting the power in their own hands.

How I built it

Currently, the application is a user interface mockup with ideas for implementation that will be pursued after the deadline. We plan on using the python framework Kivy to create the application with calls to the electronic health record API provided to modify or update data. For the speaker component, we plan on creating an Alexa skill that knows how to open the app and is able to navigate the interface by voice instead of by touch.

Challenges I ran into

I anticipate there will be many challenges in the creation of this application. In addition to traditional coding challenges this application will attempt to integrate multiple platforms (Alexa, Android, Epic/EHR), which in and of itself will likely cause many issues. Although we are familiar with Python and SQL, we have never attempted to create an application before, so there will definitely be a learning curve to even get a simple interface up and running. Additionally, any sort of application that deals with health records is subject to additional scrutiny and regulation due to HIPAA, making the actual development of a working application that can be deployed that much harder

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is our first attempt at any sort of Hackathon or Application so we are proud to have accomplished a submission, even if it is as a concept. After this competition, we will likely continue development of this application to see where we are able to go with it, and what we are able to accomplish

What I learned

In the time allotted, we learned (1) a lot about the needs of older application users and (2) much about the Kivy framework. By the end of the project, I was able to create simple Kivy tools like a calculator, which, although not directly submit worthy to the project, is more than I was able to do before!

What's next for Grow Your Health: An expandable app for virtual healthcare

Phase I will consist of creating the interface described, with additional features possibly being added if the features in Phase I are well received.

Built With

• conceptual
• electronichealthrecord
• python