MVP

MedJar: Your Medical Dictionary, Instantly

🎯 Inspiration

We've all been there: you're reading a health article online, encounter terms like "myocardial infarction" or "elevated troponins," and have to open a new tab, Google the term, scroll through complex Wikipedia pages or medical websites, try to remember what it meant, go back to the original article, and repeat for the next confusing term. It's exhausting.

One of our team members was researching their father's stroke diagnosis online, trying to understand risk factors and treatment options. Every article was filled with medical jargon. After opening their 15th tab to look up yet another term, they thought: "There has to be a better way."

That frustration became MedJar—a browser extension that instantly translates medical jargon right where you're reading, no tab-switching required.

🛠️ What It Does

MedJar is a Chromium-based extension that makes reading health information effortless with four core features:

1. Automatic Jargon Detection - Scans any webpage you're reading, highlights medical terms automatically, and works on WebMD, Mayo Clinic, health news, research articles, forums—anywhere.

2. Instant Hover Tooltips - Hover over any highlighted term and get a plain-English definition in under 0.5 seconds. No clicking, no new tabs, no interruption to your reading.

3. Smart Deduplication - Sees "diabetic," "diabetes mellitus," and "diabetes"? Recognizes they're the same thing and shows the definition once, not three times.

4. Reading Level Simplification - All definitions written at 6th-grade reading level with no medical jargon in the explanations. Actually understandable.

Example

Before MedJar:

"Patients with acute myocardial infarction often present with elevated troponins and may require immediate angioplasty."

User thinks: "What's myocardial infarction? What are troponins? What's angioplasty?" Opens 3 tabs, loses place in article.

With MedJar:

"Patients with [acute myocardial infarction] often present with elevated [troponins] and may require immediate [angioplasty]."

Hover over highlighted terms:

myocardial infarction → "Heart attack - when blood flow to the heart is blocked"
troponins → "Heart damage proteins - high levels indicate heart attack"
angioplasty → "Procedure to open blocked arteries using a balloon"

User keeps reading without interruption.

🧠 How It Works

Our system uses a multi-stage pipeline: User browses health article → Extension detects page load → Scans page for medical jargon (NER) → Highlights terms in-place → User click on term → Fetches definition (cached if seen before) → Shows tooltip instantly.