HospitalMatcher

Inspiration

In many developing countries, for example, Cairo, you often needs to drive to a hospital in case of an emergency. However, you might end up driving them to mulitple hospitals until you find an available spot, and you would lose valuable time for the patient.

What it does

The android application matches the user with the nearest hospital with available spots respect to their current location. For demo purposes, we have manually extracted the information of some hospitals in Montreal. To ensure accuracy, we plan to give the hospitals the permission to update the availability.

How we built it

We used Android Studio to build the application, and tried to incorporate the usage of Google Map API to find the closest hospitals to the user.

Challenges we ran into

None of us has much experience with Android Studio and API, so the entire project itself has been a huge challenge. Although, very unfortunately, we couldn't get the Google Map API to work the way we wanted, we still learned a lot along the way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although we couldn't get the most accurate travel information from Google Map API, we were still able to create a crude but functioning android application that tells the user the closest hospitals in terms of linear distance.

What we learned

We learned to use Android Studio, learned how to work on Github to increase productivity, and learned how to use Google Map API, which includes the use of JSON.

What's next for HospitalMatcher

If we had more time, we could definitely have the Google Map API working inside the application. Then we can set up better user interfaces, as well as hospital profiles and invite hospitals to update their availability.