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Inspiration
On November 12, 2014, Doctor Jennifer Taber and her colleagues published a study on the cause of patients avoiding medical attention despite noticing symptoms of unwellness. Reasons for avoidance included fear of serious illness, fear of death, low perceived need, and distrust, discomfort, or dissatisfaction with the health care system and its physicians.
Using the tools at our disposal, our team wanted to build a program to eliminate patient fear of the unknown, educate individuals with low perceived need of symptoms of potentially serious illnesses, encourage patients to see their physician if these potential symptoms arise, and stimulate healthy personal communication and transparency between physicians and patients.
What it does
Our app bridges the gap between patient and doctor and aims to connect the two when the patient is reluctant to go in for check ups or is embarrassed to talk their primary doctor. Patients are connected to their doctor and are able to log their symptoms. On the other end, their doctor receives an aggregate score of how severe/urgent their patients condition is.
How we built it
We used android studio to produce the code that holds the front and backend of the app together. We also used adobe illustrator to produce the assets that were used for the UI.
Challenges we ran into
Code compiling on one computer, but not the other. Trying to determine the cause. Having to change one persons file to fit the syntax of the others. A year since anyone has used Java - difficult to code efficiently. Nobody has used android studio in a major capacity so we had to learn it/teach it to each other as we worked. Moreover, we were unable to find a mentor who could help us with the more complex portion of our app, and so we had to scrap an entire feature because it was too complex.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to get a mostly working app together despite constantly second guessing ourselves. Although it does not do the full range of what we initially planned for it to do, we are proud that we have a working base that we can approve upon.
What we learned
Our Clinical Science team member, Brendan, got a taste of the engineering world. He was able to peer into the engineering process, while also teaching Stephanie and Sharon the importance of patient history in diagnosing someone. We also learned about how difficult it is to actually execute a plan. It was easy for us to come up with an idea, but it was difficult to actually do it without completely going head over heels.
What's next for HealthAssist
The next phase of HealthAssist would be to implement physician-approved databases linking symptoms and diseases to provide more accurate diagnoses and levels of severity regarding each symptom or combinations of symptoms. Additionally, we wanted to implement an assistance tool for at-home macroscopic diagnosis of stool and urine by utilizing a phone camera and machine learning to recognize color, shape, and clarity of these samples in the toilet.
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