Inspiration
It's happened to all of us - you've come home after a long day of classes and you feel a little sick. The pharmacy is too far and there's NO way you're walking there after the day you've had and the way you feel. What do you do now? Pulse is an idea born out of those frustrating experiences. We wanted to build a platform where students can anonymously request medicines from fellow students in their dorms, providing them with a safe and convenient way to access medication until they can meet a medical professional or make a pharmacy run.
What it does
Pulse is a college-exclusive medicine sharing platform built to strengthen dorm communities. Instead of late-night pharmacy runs or struggling when sick, students can use Pulse to:
- Request medicines anonymously from dorm mates
- Keep track of their own medical inventory
- Build a healthier and more connected campus community It’s secure, student-only (@asu.edu verified), and designed to bring care closer to home.
How we built it
We used FastAPI with SQLAlchemy for the backend, SQLite for the database, JWT for authentication, and a JavaScript frontend with HTML and CSS for styling.
Challenges we ran into
This was our first hackathon, and we faced challenges with time pressure, learning FastAPI and JWT on the fly, coordinating team tasks, and prioritizing features under tight deadlines.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As first-time hackers, we’re proud of building a full-stack app in just 36 hours. We learned FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, and JWT authentication from scratch, while designing a secure medicine request system for dorm communities. Our team worked effectively across backend and frontend. Most importantly, we proved to ourselves that we could learn quickly and deliver under pressure.
What we learned
This hackathon taught us more than building a webapp. We learned to collaborate under pressure, divide tasks by strengths, adapt to changes, and manage time effectively. Most importantly, we gained an appreciation for teamwork, resilience, and trust in challenging situations.
What's next for Pulse
We hope to add features such as in-app calling and text alerts for urgent request. We hope scale it to universities other than ASU and add more features to make the UI more interactive. We feel this solves a real problem, and it doesn't take much investment, so we might keep working on it!
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