MedSignal

MedSignal helps patients stay on top of their medications with smart reminders and gives doctors the insights they need, fostering collaboration and improving care through real-time updates.

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Inspiration

We decided from the start to make a project that could impact everyday life by optimizing some aspect of healthcare. We considered what issues people have on a daily basis and concluded that medicine can present a complicated challenge to some individuals. In particular, several of us have seen how our grandparents need to regularly take various medicines, and it became tedious for them to manage each dose on a proper schedule. Furthermore, we wanted to build on existing medicine tracking apps by incorporating a seamless connection between a physician, patient, and that patient’s trusted contact(s). Including this additional layer of communication made it easier to ensure patients are taking the right doses of medicine at the right time, ultimately addressing our goal of making healthcare safer and more accessible in everyday life.

What it does

MedSignal is an app designed to foster patient’s connections with their doctors and to keep them both up to date with all relevant medical information. It serves as a platform where patients can input the medications they are taking and their schedules for doing so, and where medical practitioners can view their patients’ medication information and see how well the patients are adhering to the suggested routines. 
Doctors and medical professionals can easily create an account and use the scan-in QR-code feature to add their patients to their in-app list, allowing them to monitor both their medication and how often they have been taking it, as well as enabling them to send prescriptions and medication suggestions directly to their patients' accounts.
On the patients’ end, set-up is as easy as creating an account and inserting the information for their daily medications. All it takes is inputting the name of the medicine, vitamin, or supplement, the dosage, the amount on hand, and the times the medicine should be taken, and MedSignal is ready to go. With notifications to remind patients to take their meds, warnings for when their inventory is low, a summary of how consistently they have been performing, OpenAI-powered summaries of their medications and potential risks, and much more, MedSignal is your pocket-companion for all things medication.

How we built it

We started from the ground up, establishing an overall project structure using React Native. Once the general structure was in place, we listed the features that we wanted to include in our based on priority. Each team member took on a task and pushed changes to a shared GitHub repository. By splitting up tasks in this way, we were able to efficiently work simultaneously, ensuring we would be able to complete our project by the deadline. Another important component of our strategy was categorizing tasks by priority. This allowed us to focus on building the basic app we had in mind to ensure we had a functional product. Once we had something working, we could move on to lower priority features that enhanced the functionality of the app.

Challenges we ran into

There were two main challenges we ran into over the course of developing this project. For one, it was hard to establish communication between different accounts. This was a crucial component of our app since our goal was to have patients and physicians both able to track when doses are or aren’t being taken as needed. The issue was compounded by the fact that we worked on tasks separately, so passing the data presented a challenge when our separate components needed some kind of standardized format to pass data. In hindsight, we should have planned more about how data would be stored and transmitted to avoid any complicated issues when it was time to combine code.
Along that same line, merging our different pieces of code led us into some issues with git. Resolving merge conflicts was difficult at times when we were working on completely different features across the same file. Overall, the use of GitHub made it significantly easier to manage this challenge, and we were eventually able to get everything running together.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

  1. We can take in notification responses not only in the app, but also as a banner notification with the app closed.
  2. We learned how to implement the OpenAI API in several ways. It was particularly rewarding to create a scanner that could return medicine data by pointing a camera at a prescription.
  3. We created a system where physicians could digitally send prescriptions to their patients, and the patients could add this prescription as a medicine entry on their own account.
  4. We included a map that could find nearby pharmacies, doctors, or other medical facilities to make it easier for patients to find the medicine they need.

What we learned

  1. How to develop mobile apps in React Native
  2. How to integrate generative AI using the OpenAI API
  3. How to display and interactive map based on a user’s location
  4. How to use warp AI in a terminal for AI assistance during development

What’s next for MedSignal

MedSignal is a great start that already contains so many important and useful features. Still, there are several improvements that could take the app to the next level. For one, the storage of medical data requires special care. We would need to enhance security and include user agreements to ensure the app does not violate any regulations. Once these crucial components are included, it’s time to bring this product to those that need it! We want to contact physician’s offices to get them started with the app and suggest it to their patients. The sooner we can get users on the app, the sooner we can make a difference in the lives of countless patients that struggle to keep up with their medicine.
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