MedHap

What is MedHap?

MedHap is a medical android application that streamlines user and dermatologist interaction by allowing doctors to feel remotely patients’ skin texture abnormalities on their own devices and diagnose the condition within minutes. Suppose you spot a rash on yourself. Instead of booking an appointment to see a dermatologist, take a picture of your skin condition, upload it to MedHap, and go eat a snack. In the meantime, powerful machine learning techniques will generate a complete analysis and a certified dermatologist will write you a personalized diagnosis. When you’re done with your snack, this report will be sent straight to your phone. Doctors are unable to derive much information, let alone create a detailed diagnosis, from just a picture. So MedHap modifies the friction levels on doctors devices so that as the doctor scrolls his or her finger across the screen, he or she can feel the variations of the skin texture.

How does it work?

Upon registering as a user on the application, the patient takes and uploads a picture of the affected skin area. The app sends the image to the server, where IBM Watson is used to classify the skin condition. IBM Watson's cognitive model is trained using predefined tags and images. Thus, the doctor is now able to diagnose the condition and generate a report by viewing the picture and feeling the skin textures on his or her device with haptic feedback provided by the Tanvas SDK.

Significance

By the time a patient hears the words “the doctor will see you now,” weeks or even months may have passed since the booking of the appointment. A recent survey conducted by Merritt Hawkins reveals that most new patients have to wait for 18 days on average to get a medical appointment. The medical specialities of cardiology, dermatology, family practice, obstetrics/gynecology, and orthopedic surgery have the highest average wait times. MedHap reduces this waiting time significantly.