Inspiration
Vaishnavi came up with the idea of creating a food nutrition app that would scan ingredient lists on product labels and return a summary of whether or not the user can eat that product based on their diet restrictions. Shirley added onto this idea by proposing the medical element of the app: checking whether or not that product contains ingredients that may negatively interact with their medication. Shirley came up with that idea due to her experience with taking antibiotics once. She had forgotten to ask the pharmacist if she could drink coffee while taking the antibiotic. We also wanted to target senior citizens as a demographic for app, going off our experiences with our grandparents and their difficulty in remembering food-drug interactions for their medication. We created a user friendly and intuitive app, keeping the target market in mind.
What it does
mendwell allows users to enter their medications upon account creation, which can later be modified in the user's dashboard. According to the user's medications, mendwell can indicate whether a food item is safe or unsafe to consume on the basis of food-drug interactions. For instance, if a user is prescribed atorvastatin for their elevated blood pressure, they would need to avoid certain food items, such as grapefruit, to ensure the efficacy of the medication and prevent side effects. If a user is unsure of whether a food item may conflict with their medication, all they would have to do is scan the food label or item with your camera, and mendwell will analyze whether the item is safe to eat or not. Once the analysis is done, mendwell will provide a comprehensive summary of the food-drug interactions by showing a list of the ingredients and medications that conflict. It will also provide more information about the medication upon the user’s request.
How we built it
We built mendwell using React Native, Tesseract OCR, Node.js, and the native libraries for iOS. In addition to these technologies, we used Figma for creating detailed workflows in the planning process of our application.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into so many challenges while building this application. One of our biggest challenges was figuring out React Native and the iOS build process. Since we are beginners to native applications and have a stronger base in web applications, configuring React Native to build the application on our phones was the hardest part. In addition, we learned that one of the APIs we planned to use for food-drug interaction is not a public API, even though it seemed like one. We did not have enough time to contact the API provider for the key, thus we needed to pivot quickly. Another challenge we faced was configuring the Tesseract OCR for our React Native application. Tesseract OCR does have wrapper code for JavaScript and after thorough research, we had seen that it worked for others using React Native. However, we severely underestimated how much our lack of React Native knowledge will interfere with the Tesseract OCR, and unfortunately, we were not able to set it up in time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite not having a fully working project, we hit many great milestones throughout the project. Not only were we able to complete all of the screens for our UI, but we were also able to get the built-in camera working for our application, which is a great accomplishment based on how much time we’ve spent to make it work. Overall, we are very proud of our idea and the effort we’ve put through the last 36 hours, and we believe that our application has full potential to scale!
What we learned
Throughout this project, we faced a lot of challenges and as a result, we learned how to pivot quickly to avoid wasting time. For example, when we learned that the DrugBank API we were planning to use did not provide public API key, we pivoted quickly to generating mock data using ChatGPT in order to simulate various food-drug interactions for specific medications. Had we spent more time trying to figure out this issue, we would have not been able to finish building our UI screens and our Tesseract OCR connection. Another important thing that we learned is to always check whether the open-source applications we are using are up-to-date. We faced a lot of compatibility issues in the Expo client in our React Native app as well the tamagui React-Native framework. If we used containerization to deal with the discrepancies in our tools’ versions, the building process may have been a little easier for us.
What's next for mendwell
We plan to build and release our application for the Android and iOS App Store. Once that is done, we are hoping to build a startup focusing on this application and potentially partner with hospitals to not only gather the user’s medication information, but also to have them outsource their patients to mendwell. In addition, we would like to integrate mendwell with existing nutrition and allergy applications, such as fig, which will help us build a customer base that we can eventually launch to market with.
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