MedAid

Prevent Adverse Drug Reactions

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💡 Inspiration 💡

The chance of having an adverse reaction can be described as: very common – this means that 1 in every 10 people taking medicine is likely to have a negative reaction. All medicines can cause adverse reactions. Adverse reactions can range from headaches and upset stomach to more severe reactions such as liver or kidney injury. Further, it is estimated that ADRs are the sixth leading cause of death worldwide and the 4th in the United States. A recent study displays that over 180,000 people die from Adverse Drug reactions annually in the US alone, and globally there are more than 2 million who suffer from ADRs. According to studies conducted by the National Institute of Health, 1.7 million of the ADRs that occur today can be prevented.

❓ What it does ❓

MedAid combats Adverse Drug Reactions using Machine-Learning algorithms, advanced data-parsing, Application-Programming Interfaces(APIs), and Optical-Character-Recognition(OCR) software. When a user first enters the app, they are asked to create a profile containing medications they are consuming on a daily/periodic basis (which can be updated) and any health conditions that they have. Every time a user starts a new medication, it will be appended to their medication list. To avoid the hassle of inputting medicine information, one can simply scan the bottle and add it using MedAid's scanning module. MedAid scans your medicine and using analysis it determines whether or not there is a chance of an ADR occurring. If there is a risk, MedAid classifies it into 5 levels (1 being mild danger and 5 being very dangerous). If the ADR is Level 3 or higher MedAid connects you to assistance. It provides a hotline where you may ask any queries about ADRs using a chatbot or a call bot. Furthermore, it gives you food guidelines as well since ADRs can be caused due to a food-drug interaction.

How we built it

  • Frontend - HTML/CSS/Javascript
  • Backend - Flask
  • Chatbot and Call Bot- Twilio Platform
  • Medicine Detection - Machine Learning
  • Database - Firebase

Challenges we ran into

Our team's main challenges were a time constraint and a time zone difference, which is why it took us a long time to come up with a project proposal. We were able to stay in touch and assist one another at all times, thanks to the discord server. Working on a responsive website design was initially difficult. We also had to use the Twilio voice call API, something which we had never used before. We also struggled to connect the backend to the front-end part. However, in the end, we were able to make everything work!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We initially struggled to connect front-end and back-end parts, but we finally figured it out. Using the Twilio voice call API, we created a camera model, call bot, and chatbot within a concise amount of time, while having different timezones. We are proud to develop a working prototype!

What we learned

This weekend taught us a lot. We discovered —

  • How to develop fast, scalable, and simple web applications with Flask.
  • Using Twilio, you can effortlessly develop incredible products.
  • How utilizing Flask allows us to construct backends more quickly. Finally, there was a lot we learned from each other and Penapps over the weekend.

What's next for MedAid

We hope to successfully launch this application on Google Play Store and App Store by the end of 2022. We aim to implement a freemium + ads business plan as follows:

Free:

  • Unlimited medicine scanning
  • 5x/month Pharmacist checking
  • Delivery from local pharmacies
  • 5x/month Chatbot & call bot hotline

Premium ($6.99):

While there are several companies in the stream, MedAid has clear differentiators. MedAid is the only commercial drug-interaction-checker that employs a camera-scanning feature, which increases convenience as users will not be forced to type every ingredient in the medication. Additionally, MedAid will have a global medicine database and be available to the general public, unlike competitors such as MIMS, which is only available to medical professionals and limited regions, or drug.com, which only supports U.S. Medicine. Price comparison, substitute recommendations, and foods are also unique features in the ADR app market.

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