NutriSense

Inspiration

Up to 50% of older adults living in residential care and assisted living suffer from malnutrition and unintentional weight loss. Unlike acute hospital illnesses, malnutrition develops silently: an aging resident leaves half their lunch on the plate, drinks 400 mL of fluid instead of 1,500 mL, or struggles to chew due to dental fatigue.

Because traditional care facilities rely on monthly scale weigh-ins, by the time a care team notices an 80-year-old has lost 10 pounds, severe damage has already occurred — muscle wasting (sarcopenia), fatal falls, painful bedsores, and preventable hospital admissions. We were inspired by our own grandparents and front-line nursing assistants (CNAs) to build a proactive, empathetic tool that catches subtle nutritional deterioration weeks before an emergency, allowing elders to receive targeted bedside care in their own rooms.

What it does

SeptiSense (NutriSense module) is an early-warning nutritional surveillance and clinical decision support dashboard designed specifically for senior living and post-acute facilities:

Shift-by-Shift Surveillance: Tracks daily living observations recorded by CNAs (meal intake percentage at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, daily fluid volume, and swallowing/mobility notes) alongside weight trajectory.
Clinical Benchmarking with CDC NHANES: Calibrated against over 135,000 participant records from the CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), specifically establishing safe caloric, protein (g/kg), and fluid intake baselines for adults aged 65+.
Explainable AI Flagging (Bonus): It doesn't just display a detached risk percentage — it tells care teams exactly why a resident was flagged (e.g., "Weight velocity down 5.2% over 21 days; protein intake averaged 32g/day vs. 65g NHANES baseline; CNA logged chewing fatigue").
Bedside Care Plan Action Generator: Immediately suggests actionable, non-emergency protocols: meal protein fortification (Med-Pass smoothies), Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) swallowing evaluations, and denture checks to keep residents nourished and out of the hospital.
1-Tap Solana Blink Compliance: Remote visiting dietitians and physicians can review and sign off on nutritional care plans from their mobile phones via a Solana Blink. An immutable cryptographic receipt (zero-PHI SHA-256 hash) is committed to Solana devnet, creating tamper-proof proof-of-timely-care for federal CMS F-692 regulatory audits.

How we built it

Frontend: A responsive, framework-free vanilla JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS dashboard designed for fast bedside loading on tablets and care station displays, featuring dynamic SVG weight trajectories and collapsible clinical observation cards.
Backend: A high-performance, lightweight Node.js engine with RESTful endpoints for real-time resident surveillance, SBAR report generation, and automated audit logging.
Database & Time-Series: PostgreSQL powered by TimescaleDB hypertables, optimized for tracking longitudinal shift-level nutritional intake, weight velocities, and historical trend comparisons.
Clinical Intelligence Layer: Evaluates nutritional risk against the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) framework and population intake percentiles extracted from the CDC NHANES dataset (demographics, dietary recalls, and physical functioning modules).
Web3 / Solana Blink: A zero-dependency Solana transaction builder (solana.mjs) implementing the Solana Actions specification. It builds unsigned SPL Memo transactions and verifies on-chain signatures via JSON-RPC to record tamper-evident care plan attestations.

Challenges we ran into

Data Sourcing in Long-Term Care: Open clinical datasets are almost exclusively sourced from hospital ICUs (such as PhysioNet). Real nursing home EHRs (like PointClickCare) are locked in commercial silos under HIPAA. We solved this by using the CDC NHANES 1988–2018 dataset to derive authentic population baselines for older adults and pairing them with realistic CNA shift-level daily living logs.
Avoiding Alarm Fatigue: Healthcare workers are overwhelmed by generic alarms. We tuned our scoring to prioritize personal baseline velocity (how much a resident has drifted from their own 3-week normal) rather than rigid population cutoffs, preventing false positives.
Solana Blink Mobile UX: Implementing the Solana Actions spec without heavy web3 SDK bloat required building a pure, dependency-free base58/compact-u16 serializer and transaction validator to ensure sub-second confirmation on devnet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Solving the "Why": We fulfilled the hackathon bonus by making our risk engine completely transparent. Care teams never have to wonder where a score came from — every flag itemizes the exact nutritional, behavioral, and weight drivers.
Empathetic, Practical Focus: We focused on preventing decline at the bedside rather than reacting in the ICU. Catching malnutrition early means an elder stays in their comfortable room with fortified meals and speech therapy instead of facing an ambulance transfer.
End-to-End Working Architecture: From Timescale time-series persistence and interactive SVG trajectory charts to live on-chain Solana Blink memo verification, the entire pipeline is fast, lightweight, and fully functional.

What we learned

Geriatric Infection & Nutrition Are Inextricable: In older adults, early infection and malnutrition amplify each other. When an elder stops eating and drinking, their risk of urinary tract infections, pneumonia, and sepsis skyrockets within 48 hours.
The Power of Solana Blinks in Enterprise Workflows: Blockchain doesn't need to be about speculative finance. Using Solana for micro-fee ($0.00025), sub-second regulatory proof-of-care solves one of the most litigious challenges in long-term care: proving that a facility intervened promptly and did not backdate records.

What's next for SeptiSense

EHR Interoperability: Integrating with long-term care EHR standards (PointClickCare and MatrixCare APIs) to automatically ingest meal tray scanning and smart scale weights.
Multi-Condition Deterioration Modeling: Expanding the early-warning engine from nutritional decline into the full spectrum of geriatric deterioration — linking meal drops and dehydration directly to early UTI and sepsis prevention.
Mainnet Solana Compliance Attestations: Transitioning from devnet to production Solana with a dedicated zero-knowledge verification layer, giving families and state regulators verifiable proof of compassionate, timely resident care.