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This is our app's opening page. Here you can select the type of pet that is in need of medical assistance.
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After selecting what type of pet, you can choose what ails them.
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Based on your pet and ailment choice, you can choose whether your pet has a high severity case or a low severity case.
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The map shows you the nearest vets. If you click on a vet, it will display the hospital name and phone number.
Inspiration
Earlier this year, Jessica's dog started to get lethargic, limp at every step, and whine uncontrollably. Usually, Eve is the happiest dog in the world, never missing a tail wag. Jessica knew she needed to get Eve to a vet. However, it took 7 calls to veterinary services to get a vet appointment on that day. When your pet is truly in need, you don't have time to search for close vet hospitals and make 7 calls to see if they are even available.
What it does
Our app lets you select your pet's species, then the top symptom that your pet is currently experiencing. The app then gives you information about the selected symptom and lets you know whether your pet has a high or low severity case. If your pet has a high severity case, it locates the nearest vets with availability to your current location.
How we built it
We used Android Studio to build the app and ran it on the built-in emulators. We would have liked to have created a database or data warehouse in Google Cloud to store data on all the different types of pets and symptoms. We did use the Google Maps and Places APIs to show a map of all Vets close to the user's location in emergencies for ease of use.
Challenges we ran into
Neither of us have any deep experience with Android Programming, so it was definitely a challenge to learn Android Studio and the libraries on the fly. Honestly, one of the biggest challenges we ran into was just getting the page layouts formatted properly in the XML files. The other challenge was figuring out how to display relevant veterinarians close to the user. The Google APIs ended up making this quite easy but finding that solution took quite a while.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud that we actually were able to make an app that can do something meaningful. It isn't scaled yet, but it can still fulfill the entire functionality we wanted to create for some inputs. We were very skeptical of our abilities to create an Android app and we are just happy that we were able to see something cool happen in the emulators.
What we learned
We learned how to do Android Programming and how to use the Google Maps and Places APIs. We also learned how difficult it can be to create simple tools/functionalities within apps. We have a greater appreciation for complex apps like Discord and Google Maps. We also learned how important it is to have a team. It was a lot of work just for the two of us and it made us realize how crucial having a full team is to being successful and efficient.
What's next for Pet Emergency
We need to scale the backend to utilize the cloud and instead of hardcoding the symptoms and severities. We would like to pull that data from another website through data scraping or just develop a database with medical data for all pet - symptom combinations. That would greatly optimize our backend and allow for easy scaling. We also would like to improve the UI. Neither of us are graphic designers so the UI is somewhat minimal, so we would like to find a proper UI/UX engineer to improve the UI/UX to commercial quality. We would also like to add a "How to Help" function for pets with low severity issues.
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