MedAlert

Inspiration

In rural Bangladesh, the infant mortality rate is dangerously high due to lack of resources for healthcare and health education. Women lack access to the support they need during their pregnancy. Support staff lack resources to provide necessary healthcare.

What it does

MedAlert sends periodic automated messages to expecting mothers throughout each stage of their pregnancy. These alerts will let mothers know symptoms and provide tips for each stage of pregnancy. Expecting mothers can text MedAlert with concerning symptoms. Potential illnesses will be extracted from the database and sent to the mothers for diagnosis and support.

How we built it

We used Android Studio to create the application. We used Python to integrate all of the Twilio services.

Challenges we ran into

Trying to account for all of the technological restrictions in rural Bangladesh made coming up with the app's concept very difficult. Implementation of Twilio was very challenging due to the rapidly changing environment of Twilio.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we successfully accomplished an immense feat we were not sure we would be able to accomplish. We are proud that we were able to successfully implement Twilio in our application.

What we learned

We had a lot of first-timers on our team who gained valuable experience in using applications they had never used before. Coming from different backgrounds, we learned different thought processes and skills from one another. We learned more about the experience of working in a team, under specific time constraints and in a hackathon environment.

What's next for MedAlert

In the future, our goals for MedAlert include text to speech function for illiterate users, language translation and an alerts and messages feature for healthcare workers to receive messages from users. We plan for more fluid integration between Python and Android.