Inspiration.
Despite the countless methods to address health, fitness, and nutrition needs within the community, in order to optimize implementation and development of health infrastructure, it is paramount to understand current and local community needs. Working with available and accessible tools—Google Maps and Algolia APIs—we can evaluate to current locations and services to address this health related issue.
What it does.
Mirage Map is a web application that determines current locations and services based on community health infrastructure facets of health, fitness, and nutrition. Individual (patient specific) address can be input into the application and surrounding health infrastructures—health clinics, supermarkets, fitness centers, and other services—can be visualized.
Using Baltimore as a standard city-scale community model, we implemented population density and median income data based on zip code to examine potential primary care deserts, nutrition deserts, fitness deserts, and transportation deserts. We normalized the scores of each service to calculate the risk factor for potential health infrastructure deficit.
Using the functional maps, health infrastructure deserts are visualized to target areas of high risk factor to find direct solutions. Optimized solutions can be implemented based on community need—building a brand new clinic in high density and high risk communities, or advertising fitness services to lower density and high risk communities.
How we built it.
We learned to use Google Maps API to fetch real-time location data [1]. The code is based on Javascript. Python was used to develop a model for risk assessment and optimization using census data.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/
Accomplishments we are proud of.
We strongly believe that our application addresses the foundational issue associated with community health infrastructure. Mirage Map arises awareness of risk for health deserts in any area by addressing each level of the community. We are proud that our app is hosted Google Cloud, making the valuable information accessible to everyone—patients, researchers, and practitioners.
Check it out here: https://medhacks-215721.appspot.com
What's next?
Our start of Mirage Map is a relevant and translational idea. We aim to use these “functional maps” for future optimization of health infrastructure implementation.
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