Medmory

Medmory: Personalised attention and care for the world.

Inspiration

Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half take two. Yet, over 60% of patients in America alone do not take their medications as prescribed – with the majority citing forgetfulness: forgetting when to take, forgetting if they have taken. This is a global crisis. Contributing to billions of dollars of wastage in addition to antibiotic resistance. No accessible solution seems to be in sight – one that the rich, poor, tech savvy or not can use. Medmory is a solution we devised: an automatic personal buddy that looks out for patients and helps doctors administer better care. A personal assistant available to every individual worldwide.

What Medmory does

It's primary function: help patients keep track of their medications via SMS reminders. At prescription, pharmacists and doctors enter anonymized prescription information into our system. We keep track of each individual's prescription and drops in SMSes to remind them of when and how to take their medications. If patients miss the SMSes, we will drop a automated voice call to alert the patient. During doctor visits, actionable insights on patient adherence will also be made available to doctors and pharmacists to better understand the patient.

How we built it

The core of Medmory is built in Django with Huey task processors connected to Twilio endpoints. A front-end developed with React is built for the Doctors – to enter prescription information and as a landing page to describe how the application works. The system is mounted on Google's Compute Engine.

Challenges we ran into

We faced challenges working with Twilio apis and devising a system that would be user-centric. The core of our project was centered around making the end-user experience on their phones work like magic. We struggled hard with making all the different technologies fit together – React, Django, SQLite, Twilio, Google Compute Engine, within the span of a little more than a day.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

Three of our team members were first-time participants in a Hackathon (at least a technical one), and we're really proud that we made something functional and at least capable of being demoed. Over the hackathon, we also learned from each other, worked well, and had a swell time. That's something we're all proud of.

What we learned

How to put lego bricks together but this time as an adult. Learning how to knit all the different technologies together.

What's next for Medmory

Developing a more robust architecture.
Data analytics platform for doctors and pharmacists
Use NLP to interpret text message and automatically ingest data into data store
Global deployment for Medmory and made available to everyone – regardless of nationality, race, or financial background.