Moodstrual

Screenshot of web page
Screenshot of web page

Due to systemic problems and medical misogyny, female patients often experience mistreatment when seeking healthcare. Issues such as the dismissal of symptoms, underrepresentation in medical research, and underdiagnoses are common, especially with respect to women’s reproductive health. Because of this, we were inspired to create a project that aims to help individuals who menstruate better advocate for their reproductive health. This website’s tracking function allows for empirical recordings of the person’s mood and potential symptoms they may be experiencing when on their period. There is also an AI-powered chatbot option that can answer health-related questions tailored to the user, based on their tracked information imputed.

To construct this project, we used a Python backend, the Google Gemini API for AI-powered chatbot responses, and a React frontend. We learned how to use generative AI to quickly create a basic skeleton of the website. Similarly, we gained practice with web design in terms of making it both aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly by testing out different colours and display layouts. Although the two of us came from different backgrounds, we learned to use our respective skillsets to collaborate on the project together.

In terms of setbacks, most of our challenges occurred during the brainstorming process. We had many different ideas on how to approach the problem and it was difficult to differentiate between features that were wants vs. needs, given the time constraint of the hackathon. There was also a bit of a learning curve associated with prompting Gemini properly to output the code we wanted.