Quick Health

Inspiration

Living alone and having social anxiety in talking to new people I don't know any neighbours around me in my flat, this does worry me if I was to have a medical emergency. I know my local number for emergency services and theres apps but I was inspired to use Quick Replies to help people find and attempt to diagnose some of the common first aid problems.

What it does

Using resources from my first aid book and online, quick replies will send you down routes based on options clicked to attempt to diagnose the situation, administer the correct steps of first aid and provide emergency service numbers when needed.

How I built it

The application is written in Node, ran inside a docker container. It uses Koa as its framework. The payload of the quick replies buttons are used as a method of determining the next set of dialogue, I built it like this as I wanted something stateless and keeping the user down a specific path like a text adventure game.

On mobile there's a persistent menu that allows the user to change options and restart and using the payloads allow easy switching of context.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenges I ran into were:

• Deving locally, I had to use tools to allow my https traffic out of the network to locally test
• Coming up with a reusable dialog pattern, as a lot of the work was just outputting dialog to the customer to create a reusable pattern within the codebase that allowed expandability if this app was to ever more journeys.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I built this from scratch, I have used other bot frameworks like botkit in the pass but this application is written mostly by me other than using koa for the http server. I am also proud of the stateless system allowing people to easily switch journeys on mobile.

What I learned

I have learned to take a step back and not over complicate things for example I was going to build this application with a mongo database when it wasn't needed. Reusability is also key and having (despite it being javascript) strict object shapes to ensure you can pass objects into utility functions to allow for expandability.

What's next for Quick Health

Truth be told, nothing, the risk for Quick Health to be out on the web is too high due to the lack of vetting of medical information and there are other amazing applications out there for first aid. However I do plan to take the information I've learn around Facebooks apis and potentially build a different project in the future. This has also been my first hackathon project and does inspire me to get involved in more as it was fun to come up with an idea and build it.

Built With

• drone
• koa
• node.js