MedCare

Ever heard of “cyberchondria’? Ever found yourself googling symptoms? Each search leads to excessive anxiety, especially if your paper cut turns into diabetes. Solve all your problems with MedCare!!

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Inspiration⚡

Diseases and illnesses are already bad enough as is. However, in today’s society, misinformation is a severe issue in the healthcare sector. It can cause mass hysteria, and people may turn to harmful products in order to attempt to cure themselves of diseases they only believe they may have.

In recent years, especially with the extremely rapid development of social media platforms, misinformation has run rampant. Everyone has access to false information, and many people cling onto the words of popular influencers, who may not always be correct. This is a major problem, especially amongst a global pandemic, as a misinformed person serves not only puts themselves at risk, but they also endanger the lives of others.

Our team recognized that the prevention of misinformation is a major concern in today’s world. This inspired us to create MedCare, a product that not only helps users find information through credible sources, but also find information on potential illnesses with the click of a button.

What it does🏥

MedCare is a self-diagnosis tool that uses sophisticated computer algorithms to provide a variety of diagnoses based on the user's experiences. The diagnosis tool searches a database for the symptom and its associated diseases based on the user's input. It then sorts all of the diseases present within the database by their rarity, displaying the most likely diseases with the inputted symptom. Finally, information on the few most likely diseases will be scraped primarily from credible resources on the internet, such as Mayo Clinic - diseases which will then be displayed for the user.

How we built it💻

When we first began working on this project, we had one goal in mind: To create a simple and elegant web page that was user friendly, and easy to navigate. To properly execute this, we first planned out the major tasks and roles that needed to be met in order to efficiently finish the project on time. These included: finding a reliable dataset that contained both symptoms and diseases, as well as the correlation between the two, Our objective was to generate a list of possible diseases based on the symptoms entered. The web application was divided into two parts: backend and front end. We used HTML, CSS, and a little BootStrap to create a simple but elegant webpage on the front end. In the back end, we used the Python based web framework Flask, to sort through the data, find all possible diseases, and display their details from existing web pages on the internet. Finally, we hosted our webpage through the use of Flask.

Challenges we ran into🔥

Originally, we planned to use JavaScript, React with Django as the web framework but we were unsure in regards to the database and how we could manipulate it to satisfy the needs of the diagnosing tool. Therefore, we decided to transition into using Flask.

Accomplishments that we're proud of✨

  • Scrolling background
  • Using Flask as a web framework
  • Extracting Data from a website
  • Creating an elegant website
  • A very user friendly product

What we learned📚

  • We learned that early diagnosis can result in early precautions and new treatment plans
  • There were a lot of steps we had to follow to finish the project
  • Integrating front end with a back end is a lot harder than one can assume

What's next for MedCare📈

MedCare has the potential to become a much larger project with more functions. If time wasn’t a constraint, MedCare would have had additional features such as the ambulance tracker, nutrition guide, and maybe an AI consultant.

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