La Busqueda

Medicine Finder for Countries in Need

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Inspiration

In countries like Venezuela there is a huge scarcity of basic need products, specially medicines. Medicines have a price ceiling on them, making the production cost higher than the selling point. Many manufactures are forced to produce little quantities while the government do not subsidize them. There is currently a similar approach to this problem that is commenting on instagram posts requesting for help but most of the times this leads to nothing, we decided to make a user friendly website to address this point.

What it does

La Busqueda (The Search) is a community based medicine finder, where users can ask for help to find certain medicines like ibuprofen, acetaminophen, antibiotics and much more. Other members can help find the goods using the Google Maps API to pin point the exact location of the item. This is will allow users to find their medicines without going through many pharmacies and wasting resources.

How we built it

This is a mobile site, built with the idea of one day being converted into a full fledged mobile app. We used Ionic2 with AngularJS in order to accomplish this goal. We also used Firebase as the database to further the simplicity of one day transferring this to a mobile app, should it be deemed necessary.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some interesting problems with implementing log in with google, just because the google provider was being blocked by Iowa State’s internet service. We managed to get around it.

We also had to find a way of displaying custom info window’s in the Google Maps API implementation. This turned out to be pretty difficult, but we managed to figure it out by using AngularJS’s $compile service, to precompile HTML before being displayed on the page. This way, the info window was compiled with fresh, pertinent information for each marker.

I think we would both say the majority of the website wasn’t incredibly difficult, but it did involve a lot of structure, and styling.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to have a created a mobile website capable of providing resources to people in need. The idea is, that in certain under privileged areas of the world, things like medicine can be hard to come by. This app provides a way for people to create accounts, and register medicines at different locations. Then when people log into the website, they are greeted with a Google Maps API implementation that displays all available medicinal resources in the user’s area.

What we learned

We learned about the frameworks for both AngularJS and Ionic2. We also learned about implementing the Google Maps API, and got plenty of opportunities for bettering our HTML, and CSS.

What's next for La Busqueda

  • Translate to Spanish
  • Market it in Venezuela
  • Merge everything to the cloud.
  • User Communications
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