Pocket Nurse, with you in sickness and in health

Pocket Nurse is a mobile app that provides home care nursing to patients for a quick recovery by monitoring their condition and by timely advice, without the need for any medical devices.

Comment

Inspiration

In developed countries like the USA, doctors spend a lot of time explaining medication and care plans to their patients. In developing countries like India, doctors don’t even have time to guide the care plan to their patients. Yeah! We have been there. But, by the time patients return home, 80% of them would still get confused about their medications, care, and diet plan. Plus, they don’t even have proper medical devices to monitor their condition.

Hiring a home-care nurse could cost a fortune and patients be on their own and often call doctors for the minor inconvenience.

Everyone deserves better healthcare but not everyone can afford the most of it. We know what it feels like growing up in such a situation and we build Pocket Nurse.

What it does

Pocket Nurse is a mobile app that uses an on-device mobile camera and flash to record the patient's condition like heart rate, urine analysis, etc... periodically during their care plan while guiding them about medication, allergies, diet for a speedy recovery and care plan automatically.

Prescription Sage Module: Pocket Nurse syncs the patient's prescription and explains to them why and when to take each medication. That way patients won’t miss their medication and would complete their full course. [Often patients won’t complete a medication course once they start feeling better. This could cause medication resistance.]

Plus, it gives an easy option for patients to update the medications' side-effects and allergies in one-click to their doctors for quick monitoring. That way doctors can reduce multiple calls from patients.

Home-Care Nursing Monitor Module: Pocket Nurse provides patients uses an on-device mobile camera and flash to measure the heart rate and urinalysis of the patient and upload it to the doctor periodically. That way, the doctors can craft their most effective care plan and make their patients feel heard. While patients don't need to own a pulse-meter.

Diet Plan: Pocket Nurse finds the best diet plan for certain medication conditions that would help the patient to recover quickly. After all, we all know food is a magic medicine. [under development]

How I built it

Following technologies and data were used to build Pocket Nurse:

  1. Native Android [Java] to create a mobile app.
  2. Google Cloud, Firebase, Python to build the backend.
  3. DrChrono APIs: Authentication API, Prescription Read API, Allergy Read & Write API, Document read & write API. For the complete operation of our app.
  4. We did colorimetry analysis to build the most accurate heart rate detector and urinalysis using a mobile camera and flash removing the need for medical devices.
  5. Dataset: We created Fast Fourier Transform modules for colorimeter analysis using test data and results generated by real pulse-meter and visual observation. [Test sample for FFT n=68]

Challenges I ran into

As we got to know about this hackathon a week before the deadline, we had limited time to develop the whole app and we feel if we had more time we would have innovated more on Pocket Nurse.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to implement a heart rate monitor using a mobile phone camera with high accuracy which could replace expensive pulse-meter that most people can’t afford. [People in countries like India, earn less than $2 per day.]

Also, with Pocket Nurse, we removed the adaptation barrier and domesticated or could promote usage of pulse meters and urinalysis at home to monitor sickness.

What I learned

We learned that people often misplace their prescriptions, get confused with the order of medication to consume, the patients don’t know why monitoring their pulse levels are important for a speedy recovery, and many more, we can write a whole thesis about it.

What's next for Pocket Nurse, with you in sickness and in health

Disclaimer: The below plan is based on what we have seen in our country market, as we weren’t fortunate enough to go to other countries and study their market in person. :) Correct us in the comment if we are wrong.

The Plan: If supported, we will be building a WhatsApp based chatbot version of Pocket Nurse and will promote it in Indian markets through the doctors under DrChrono to provide virtual home-care nursing to patients. In one way, we democratize home-care nursing while DrChrono can penetrate into the Indian market.

Technical Reference: Heart-pulse detection using a mobile phone camera, flash and colorimetry: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49627485_A_Novel_Method_to_Detect_Heart_Beat_Rate_Using_a_Mobile_Phone

Built With

Share this project:

Updates