LifeBot

Inform people about the active blood donation event happening in Nepal. Learn more about blood donation centers. Educate people about blood misconceptions. Allow users to enquire and request blood.

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Inspiration

According to the annual report of Nepal Red Cross Society (2015-16), nationwide blood collection of Nepal is 230,986 while the supply is 310,623. There is still a huge need for replacement donors. There is thus an undeniable possibility of having an insufficient volume of blood products at blood banks leaving patients’ lives at risk. The existing blood management process in Nepal is manual and inefficient. This, in turn, has led to a labor-intensive search process for patients and healthcare providers. Our research on the current landscape has identified an immediate need for an efficient and transparent blood management solution. There is a huge void when it comes to transparent and trackable data on usage, shortage, and wastage of blood and its products, also leading to a risk of less motivated youth donors. Also, since the onus of arranging blood is on the patient’s family, many of them are burdened to roam around searching for blood. In addition, they are not trained to handle blood while they transport it from one place to the other, thus begging for a need for higher process control.

What it does

Hamro LifeBank aims to address current issues head-on with smart technology, awareness, and logistics management modules. Our goal is a holistic blood service system which includes data-centric workflow, a communication hub, and smart logistics services. While all three components are interlinked for the overall success. The first Part is the Donor App which gives information to the donor regarding the active events happening in our community. Similarly, the second part is the website where the digitization of the manual donor information are done. The third part is engaging donors and blood needy people by using the chatbot along with providing awareness to the community about the blood donation misconceptions. To summarize the Chatbot and overall Hamro lifebank provides: THE DATA-POWERED SOLUTION: Solve I - Smart Blood Banks A central repository built with all the needs of the nuances of local blood banks will help blood banks keep a transparent stock inventory accessible to hospitals and brew harmonized donor database. Solve II - Donor Motivation & Retention Hamro LifeBank is running smart blood donation campaigns targeted at youth. The overall blood management system will track blood data from collection to supply, thus creating a digital lifecycle of a blood bag. Imagine “Sia” donates blood. Hamro LifeBank’s mobile app captures her donor data and blood bag details. The blood bank tracks Sia’s blood investigation results, adds her blood bag details to Hamro Lifebank’s inventory and tracks details as the blood bag gets dispatched to a hospital, thus creating a digital lifecycle of a blood bag. Siyah is then sent a thank you message that her blood saved a life. Siyah is motivated to donate again.

Challenges we ran into

The major challenge for Hamro LifeBank is adaptation and change management from a paper-based system to a fully digital system. However to overcome these challenges Hamro LifeBank provides assistance to the blood banks in transition with digitalize services - by digitizing their existing data and training blood bank technicians to use our system.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have different blood banks and organizations that are actively involved with us to help with the digitization and collaborate with us to inform people about the blood donation events happening across the Kathmandu city enabling us to provide quick support to the blood required patients by either connecting them to the blood bank where the required blood bags are available or by managing blood donors instead of blood bags.

What we learned

In Nepal, People have lots of misconceptions regarding blood donation activity. Hence, this enables us to solve this issue with chatbot where people can actively talk with the bot to learn about the blood donation myths such as blood donation can done only once a year.

Furthermore, People are interested in blood donation event but people are not aware of the blood donation events happening around the city. Hence, to solve this problem we have added the donation event API which allows people to know about the donation events as well as register themselves to donate if they are interested.

In nutshell, it is clear that in Nepal, due to the lack of proper information and management, it is very hard for the people to get the blood during an emergency. and the Lifebot aims to solve this problem by spreading awareness among the people as well as create the donor community for active participation in the donation event.

What's next for LifeBot

Till now this chatbot is in the development phase, so we have added limited features such as blood misconception, donation event available and pledging to donate if future donation event occurs as well as informing people about nearest blood banks and blood providing hospitals.

So for future activity, we will start directly engaging people about broadcasting information regarding different health-related issues rising around the community and how to prevent them. Moreover, people can directly request blood to the hospital/blood bank near them through the chatbot. Connect to the donors directly to the authentic patients. Allow admin users of lifebot to manage the content that will be shown in the chatbot themselves to keep the chatbot updated. Sending thank-you notes for donating through chatbot thanking them for the successful participation in the event or donating to the patients instead of sending out email or SMS which costs time and money.

Built With

  • dialogflow
  • dialogflow-fulfillment
  • express.js
  • https://donation.hamrolifebank.com/api/v1/public/events?status=upcoming
  • mongodb
  • node.js
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