Health Fluency

Inspiration

In our experience it can be challenging to be matched with the right people for our health and wellness needs. With medical issues, getting the diagnosis is only half the challenge. Finding the right individuals tends to serve our needs in the same way medicine does. We are bombarded by food and social media companies that use science to hijack our brains and addict us to things that can be harmful to our health and wellness in the long run. Living a healthy lifestyle requires an arsenal of tools and the right people to avoid the mistakes that may get in our way.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen accelerated advances in telemedicine technologies. Which is why we came up with Health Fluency. Health Fluency is a tool meant to facilitate the process of finding the right doctor/specialist according to your needs. It is also a platform where peers can voluntarily be matched up to accountability partners with similar goals to stay motivated and on track with their health and wellness goals. Having accountability partners has shown to increase success in achieving goals from 43% to 76% [1].

[1] https://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1265&context=news-releases

What it does

Our platform allows individuals to get matched with health professionals at the comfort of their own home. It also helps them keep up with their treatments by assigning them accountability partners who also have the same treatment as them, and also by helping keep track and manage their appointments with their doctors.

Home

This landing page delves into some information regarding the web application as a whole. It previews how Health Fluency works and what we’re all about through a series of images and text. It also contains a “Get Started” button which redirects you to a getting started page.

Getting Started

This page consists of two main parts. A four step process and a grid layout which has several options you can choose from. The four step process consists of: Fill out a questionnaire so that the doctor gets a better idea of who you are. Get matched with a doctor who will understand your needs. Receive treatment plan and medication from the doctor Get in touch with an accountability partner.

As of right now the grid layout consists of the following options: Stress Depression Anxiety Pain High Blood Pressure Dermatology Questions Joint Injuries Other Questions

Depending on the option you select you will be redirected to the appropriate questionnaire suited to that option.

Questionnaire

This questionnaire section contains a series of different questions. The goal here is to have each set of questions tailored to an individual's problems and needs giving each user a more personalized experience. The idea is to have the series of questions take you down a decision tree based on the responses you select.

Dashboard

In the dashboard page, there will be a motivational quote for the day and also an overview of the user’s health goals, progress, and their appointments. The checklist section is similar to a to do list where they can check off any goals they have accomplished for the day. It also allows them to chat with their accountability partner for that goal. The progress bar allows the user to see their progress and check how many goals they have completed in the past few months. Lastly, we have the doctors section where the user can see their assigned doctors and if they have any upcoming appointments with them.

ChatBot

The chatbot can help the user answer any questions they have, such as if they have any upcoming appointments. It can also help them reschedule or cancel any appointments they have with a doctor. Lastly, it can provide immediate help whenever the user is in a crisis.

How we built it

The front-end is built with React which allows the team to create a fast, modern, and responsive UI.

To implement the chat feature of the app, our team wanted to try something new, which is why we chose Cloud Firestore. By using Firestore, our frontend will not need to connect to a socket server, instead, it directly listens for updates on the database. This makes it easy for our UI to update whenever new messages are sent. The chatbot was implemented using Google Dialogflow. As for the backend, we have a Python web server hosted on Google Cloud Platform.

Challenges we ran into

We faced some challenges with scope. We had a feature list we stuck too which was modified according to our time constraints. It required us to think about the tradeoffs of one feature over the other and make some challenging decisions. Luckily we are all familiar with VS code, git and discord which allowed our collaboration to run smoothly. However we found it difficult to collaborate at times when working on different components on the same page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With only 24 hours and a small group of 3, we are very proud of the amount and quality of the features we were able to implement. We are also proud of being able to use the skills that we have developed to build something that can help us tackle an issue that many will and have faced in our life. As we worked on this project for the last 24 hours, we kept on thinking of more features to add and other improvements so that it is even more useful, but could only pick a few because of the time constraint. We saw it has potential to help others and that is something we are very proud of.

What we learned

Each of us gained some more experience working with full stack web technologies. The hackathon was a great way for the three of us to gain more hands-on coding experience. We also were able to touch on a lot of team working aspects that are harder to come by if you're not put in time constraint/high pressure situations.

What's next for Health Fluency

Health Fluency can be grown to solve a larger more diverse user group by adding more prompts and giving the user a more tailored experience. The chat bot for Health Fluency is currently more of an assistant for any general question a user may have but in the future I think the chatbot could become a buddy for the user. Chatbots are a less intimidating way for someone to just speak their mind and vent. The chatbot could be a quick and intelligent system able to empathize and converse with the user, making Health Fluency a very interactive and proactive application. We also think the chatbot can be used as an additional accountability partner.