MedSafe

How we built it# MedSafe: A Personalized Food-Drug Interaction Checker

Inspiration

India is a land of rich and diverse cuisines, but it’s also a country where chronic health issues are increasingly common. Many people are on lifelong medications, yet they struggle to remember which foods to avoid due to potential harmful interactions. A wrong combination can cause severe complications — especially for those with conditions like heart disease or kidney failure.

This idea stems from two very personal incidents:

My grandfather, a kidney patient who underwent multiple surgeries, often forgot what to avoid while recovering. Despite doctors giving him detailed instructions, he would forget which foods might interfere with his medications — sometimes worsening his condition.
For me personally, my mom always reminded me what not to mix while taking medicine. But now that I live in a hostel, there’s no one to guide me — and keeping track of it all became tough.

In India, awareness about food-drug interactions is low, and such information isn’t easily accessible. That’s why we created MedSafe — an intelligent assistant that helps anyone stay safe with their food and medicines.

What We Learned

This project taught us a lot beyond coding:

How food-drug interactions actually happen and why they’re important.
How to conduct meaningful background research — we spoke to a practicing doctor for real-world insights.
How to plan and execute a project collaboratively while balancing academics (we’re both in 1st year B.Tech and had internals during development).
How to debug effectively and manage time under pressure.

We also got to explore AI integrations, especially combining Cursor AI and Bolt AI in creative ways.

🛠️ How We Built It

Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
AI & Logic Layer: Cursor AI + Bolt AI
Team: 2-person team collaboration

Core Features

Active Prescription Saver
Saves your current medications and auto-categorizes them as active or inactive based on usage frequency and timing.
Custom Food Builder
Allows users to create personalized food profiles by saving their ingredients — perfect for home-cooked dishes. It eliminates the need to manually check ingredients every time.
Interaction Checker
Type in your food/ingredient or medication to instantly check for harmful interactions. A direct drug-ingredient comparison tool is also available for quick checks.

Challenges We Faced

Debugging AI integrations: We had multiple bugs where the AI models weren’t responding or returning inaccurate matches.
Time Constraints: Being 1st-year students with ongoing internal exams, balancing this project with academics was a real challenge.
Lack of public datasets: Standardizing food and drug names.
UI/UX Flow: Designing an experience that’s simple for both tech and non-tech users was an ongoing iterative process.

Despite all odds, we successfully built a working version of MedSafe and are excited about where it can go next.

Final Note

MedSafe is more than just a hackathon project. It’s a step toward health awareness and accessibility, especially for the elderly and students living independently. We're proud of what we achieved, and even more excited to improve and scale it further.