Med Verify

A simple medicine and food verification to prevent consumption of fake products that kill alot of people worldwide and cause fatal illnesses.

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Inspiration

Every year, counterfeit and unregistered food and drugs kill hundreds of thousands of people across Africa and millions across the world. In Nigeria alone, NAFDAC (National Agency for Food and Drug) estimates that 25–40% of drugs in circulation are fake. Most citizens have no easy way to verify if a product is safe before consuming it. We built Product Verify to fix that.

What it does

Med Verify is a Telegram bot that lets anyone verify a drug or food product in seconds:

  • Type a NAFDAC number of food or drug → instant verification result
  • Snap a photo of the product label → AI reads and verifies automatically
  • Results show product name, brand, registration status, expiry, and counterfeit warnings

How we built it

  • Telegram Bot API (python-telegram-bot) as the user interface
  • NAFDAC Public Registry API for real-time product lookup. For now we had to use a dummy API.
  • OpenAI Vision API for photo-based label text extraction
  • Python backend deployed on Heroku
  • Fallback to WHO/FDA open datasets for cross-border verification

Challenges we ran into

  • NAFDAC's API has limited public documentation — we reverse-engineered endpoints from nafdac.gov.ng and used caching to handle rate limits
  • OCR accuracy on low-quality product photos required preprocessing with PIL
  • Keeping the UX dead-simple for low-tech users with basic phones

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

Building for public health means building for the least privileged user. Telegram works on 2G, requires no app install, and runs on any smartphone — making it the perfect delivery layer.

What's next for Product Verifi

Expand to Ghana FDA, KEBS (Kenya), other African countries and countries in the far east and Asia and leverage cross-border database and dB of drugs regulators in other countries to save lives and make verification of food and drugs more accessible.

  • Include WhatsApp for more access to people globally.
  • Create an AI that spot fake foods and wines by checking the differences in bottle, packaging and labels from the original.
  • SMS fallback via Twilio for feature phones
  • Community reporting for unverified products

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