Inspiration
Surprisingly this idea was not inspired by the 2019 novel Corona virus but rather seeing many small outbreaks of of old, but very preventable disease such as chicken pox, measles and the flu. These diseases hurt and kill more people than the Corona virus but are not given as much attention. We thought this project could bring attention to these other illnesses again.
What it does
Our project was designed to help hospitals and doctors track infectious diseases in their patients. Our website is designed for doctors to enter patients’ information (the disease, how long they have had it, and the city/cities they have been to). This data will be converted to a text file and then processed and summarized. The summary of the data which includes the city, the list of diseases within that city, and the total number of sick people is sent to the GUI which displays the general information to the public to show what diseases there are and hopefully raise awareness. The cities we chose to display are based around our team members’ hometowns.
How I built it
We divided work load into front end and back end. Eileen and Edge worked on the front end and Megan and Maggie worked on the back in. There was a lot of collaboration about how we would share the data, what data needed to be collected from the user, and how the data should be processed to get to the viewers end. Maggie and Megan's back end was given patient focused data from Eileen's Doctor portal, the back end then processed this data to be location focused so it could be shared with Edge's public app. This way the private patient data is protected from being seen by the public but the public is still aware of health threats in their area. During our time at hackCU we failed to actually connect the front and back ends but this problem will be worked on in the future.
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges we ran into were linking the front end to the back end. Another issue was when developing the back end we had to keep in mind that the data input would be coming from a doctor who was focusing on an individual, but this input format was not the most convenient for the information we wanted to display. So we had to reprocess the data into different structures that were better for our output display.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud of ourselves for going out of our comfort zones and skill levels. We worked together as a team unit and supported one another. We managed to create a project of our own idea that is bigger than anything we've created before.
What I learned
Eileen learned a lot about web development such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. She also grew her knowledge of GitHub. Maggie researched about databases and API's, she had fun exploring this new topic that none of us were brave to explore ourselves. Edge learned how to use swing GUI variables in netBeans IDE, how to incorporate threads in swing variable implementation. Overall he explored how to develop a UI for the user experience. Megan worked on her critical thinking and problem solving skills when planning how each part of the project would be tied together. She developed her skills with object oriented programming and algorithms.
What's next for Hacks For Health
Long term and on a large scale, the data would be entered and stored in database A (patient info) for doctors and hospitals to look at and track. The hope is that the hospitals and doctors can use this data to better prevent disease outbreaks in real time. The data in database A will then be summarized and condensed to the total number of infected people and the lists of diseases for each city. This is then sent to database B (reduced, public data) for our GUI read from and display. When a doctor adds a new patient to database A, database B would be updated to include the new patient in the overall summary for that patient’s city. The GUI will then display the newly calculated data. We hope that our project will raise awareness about different diseases and inspire people to take preventative measures.
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