MedAssist

Record voice memoes for future reference
Medications, their manufacturers, and active ingredients
A reminder to take your medication
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Inspiration

In this modern technological age, so many things are created with the sole purpose of monetization. Ads are plastered everywhere, truths may be altered, and privacy may be breached by companies in an attempt to make an extra buck. We hoped to create something that would keep at least the most important things in people's lives - their health - accurate and private. We were also inspired by our own busy lives and how often we may forget things. Together, these two driving forces culminated in our creation of MedAssist.

What it does

MedAssist aids people's understandings of their prescriptions by providing information of their prescriptions' manufacturers as well as active ingredients as a starting point for future research. Using the Drug Product Database API created by an extremely trustworthy source, the Government of Canada, users can see what active ingredients are present in their drugs/medications. MedAssist also comes with a built in reminder system to remind people to take their prescriptions as well as audio message recording so that people can take note about their medications for future reference.

How we built it

We used different languages such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript, all of which were lightly bundled in Bootstrap. JavaScript, specifically fetch, came into effect by implementing some of our more in-depth features such as accessing the API to find details for medication, voice recording, and

Challenges

There were many challenges we have faced as a team. The most frequently experienced one was coding. Previously, we were mostly versed in Python, and so we were forced to adapt and learn other languages/markup languages extremely quickly. One of our biggest hurdles may have been the prominence of Javascript Promises that was present within our project. We hadn't had much experience with asynchronous functions, and even with mentors' help, we still struggled. But, these challenges made our accomplishments all the more satisfying.

Accomplishments

We are proud to have tried our best completing at Deltahacks 8. As a team composed of first year university students and a grade-11 high school student, we were intimidated by the amount of work our idea posed. But despite this, we chose to continue and give it our best shot. Apart from this, another thing we are proud of is figuring out code that helps us get what we wanted from MedAssist. Figuring out the code and understanding API’s was the most stressful part of our journey but in the end, we managed to make it all work. Overall, our project did not ride on the cutting-edge of technology, but the sheer amount of skills and information that we learned in such a short period of time made each member of the group feel extremely accomplished.

What you learned

We learned to work as a team and converse over ideas that we believed would be key features of MedAssist. We did by analyzing each feature on an important scale through brainstorming and comparing. We asked each other, “What would you as a consumer want from MedAssist?”. This was a perfect starting point for us as a team to get a general idea of what a typical consumer would want. We learned to work together and make choices together. On a more technical side, as we mentioned previously, we learned lots about other languages, especially Javascript. We were also forced to learn this concept of asynchronous functions. But most of all, we developed our problem-solving skills even further. Originally, we had struggled to use the API through Javascript, but had used it through Python. As a result, we learned about technologies that we didn't even ultimately use, such as Flask and PHP.

What’s next for MedAssist

MedAssist won’t be forgotten, we will continue to work on this project after Deltahacks, and figure out even more ways this website can help people. We hope to further develop both the front-end and back-end (front-end through React and back-end through Node.js). We had many other plans for our project that did not come to fruition at the end due to time constraints which can be seen in the specks of code and files floating around our Github repo, so we will definitely going back and exploring those. Finally, of course, what's the point of a website aimed to help others if it's not going to be hosted? Using our .tech domain (we already purchased medt.tech), we will be hosting MedAssist on the internet for anybody to use in future.