BPPV Diagnosis

Inspiration

Vertigo is an extremely common disease among the elders these days, and few people know the way of diagnosing and properly treating it.

What it does

So we created a program where, through having our users answer a set of questions, we can accurately determine whether they have BPPV (Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo).

We also provide pictures and videos in our program so that our users can properly follow these instructions and be treated without having to go to the hospital.

How we built it

We designed a two-phase mobile app that one may easily download from any app store (whether on iOS or Android).

This mobile app will take one to a questionnaire first used by us to evaluate the disease state and assess if there is a need to proceed to the repositioning practice section for a try. If the patient is highly suspected to have BPPV, our questionnaire would redirect them back to the next section of our app: a text/video-instructed repositioning instruction. This repositioning process takes less than 10min and would significantly reduce the symptoms for BPPV patients after done only once.

We know that not all vertigo is caused by BPPV and you might be wondering if a misdiagnosis may lead non-BPPV patients to do this exercise: the answer is that there are no harms proven medically to non-BPPV patients with vertigos. In other words, even if one's vertigo is not caused by BPPV, doing this repositioning practice will not make their symptoms go away or deteriorate.

Why not give it a try, then?

Challenges we ran into

To provide a reliable assessment, we wanted to make sure that our questioning process is professional and scientifically makes sense. However, due to the lack of research interests in this field, we had had a hard time finding many papers that detail this process. The only paper that lists the actual questions used in this process was found and employed. We had consulted Dr. Wu, an otolaryngologist at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, whose specialty is vertigo-related diseases to further confirm the validity of this research. We present our great appreciation to her support during this time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

None of us has had prior experiences with app development, but we have tried our best to learn a brand new programming language in such a short amount of time to accomplish our goal.