MyMedicineCabinet

Add New Medicine to Cabinet
Medicine Cabinet
Compiled Restock List (Expired & Empty)
Expired Medicine List
Restock Landing Page
Home Page
Medicine Log Landing Page
Empty Medicine List
Log Single Intake of Claritin
Welcome Message (Backend)
Adding a Medicine (Backend)
Actively Taking a Medicine (Backend)

Inspiration

There's nothing like coming down with a cold, cough, or other bodily ache only to realize that you do not have enough medicine left or that its way past its expiration dates. While expired over-the-counter (OTC) medicines may not pose the greatest health risk, MyMedicineCabinet was inspired by the problem of it being unsafe and inconvenient to have to purchase medicine during your time of need and not having a simple way of making sure your most commonly used OTC medicines are with you when you need it most. Additionally, knowing when to restock expired or near empty medicines--as supposed to purchasing in excessive bulk 'just in case'--reduces waste and unnecessary consumption.

What it does

MyMedicineCabinet has four core functions. Firstly, the user can "stock" their virtual medicine cabinet by uploading information about their medicines (i.e. expiration date, dose amount, dose frequency, symptoms addressed, etc.). Once uploaded, the user can then fully view everything they currently have in their household. Secondly, users can log their medicine intake when they're using a certain medicine--this not only helps calculate when it is time to repurchase it but also can provide the user with a history of what medicines they most commonly use for a certain aliment. Thirdly, with a combination of logging intake data; entered expiration date; and medicine count, MyMedicineCabinet creates Expiration and Empty lists, notifying the user of which medicines that nearly empty, empty, or expired. Which fourthly and finally, MyMedicineCabinet populates a Restock list easily allowing a user to repurchase and re-add these medicines to their cabinet (or fully remove them from the cabinet if they didn't work).

How we built it

We built MyMedicineCabinet's main backend algorithms using Java in the VSCode virtual environment. We created MyMedicineCabinet's interactive front-end demo using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into was deciding the tech stack to use and accommodating the fact that we were a smaller team. Another challenge we ran into was simplifying our initial problem statement and project scope into something that was feasible to complete.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we have a simple terminal interface to which the user can interact with the MyMedicineCabinet and input medicines, mark them as actively taking, and provide counts of how many doses left or how close the medicines are to expiring. We are also very proud of our design work that shows what a fully-fledged development of this application could look like. Additionally, we're excited that our project can also be used as inspiration for other project ideas that could benefit from similar expiration date and quantity tracking (i.e. accounting for food waste).

What we learned

This was a great experience building a project on our own from start to finish and realizing that sometimes the initial goals and project scope may not be feasible in a given time frame--but nevertheless still creating an output we are proud of.