healthINFO

What the Chrome Extension looks like now - We intend to have it eventually be able to extract information to the search engine
Sample Query entered (manually) - in the future we would like to automate this process from the extension
Sample Query Answers - Mental Health and Violence - conclusions of main findings from most relevant articles
Another Sample Query Answer on the topic of Sleep and Covid-19
Classic Misinformation Example for Vaccine Hesitancy - Titles of Research Articles
Classic Misinformation Example for Vaccine Hesitancy - Conclusion(s)
In addition to the search functionality, we also want to provide a feature to allow users to input certain words to hide
Another example of TW/CW as an option as certain words may be potentially triggering to some individuals during the search process

Inspiration

Coming from life science related background, we see a lot of unreliable information circulating on our social media and in news articles. Often the information that could help clear out misinformation is not very accessible.

What it does

We want to create a convenient application to guide people to reputable information typically shared between health professionals and researchers.

How we built it

We developed a Google Chrome extension to obtain information from an article, which we would pass through a Python program to search in the PMC/MEDLINE database for relevant articles.

Challenges we ran into

We definitely had a lot of trouble in the early stages of figuring out how to create and integrate a functional Chrome extension with a python script. Furthermore, we had some problems extracting information from the relevant databases. The wonderful mentors at this hackathon helped us a lot to overcome some of the problems that arose during the course of our development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We've come a long way, learning how to build a Chrome extension with JavaScript, a language which half of us have not ever used before. We managed to put together a python script and 2 prototype chrome extensions in less than 30 hours, especially given that most of us did not have a strong computer science background.

What we learned

We really learned how work together as a team and co-ordinate in different time zones. We learned a lot of new languages and tools for software development. The workshops also helped a lot!

What's next for healthINFO

We plan to expand the application to run more smoothly on any website, and include more databases. In addition, we would like to deliver the information to our audience in a more accessible manner in the future.