SuperMed

Home page
French medicine names and photos
German medicine names
Chinese medicine names

Inspiration

We got the idea for this app after one of our teammates shared that during her summer internship in China, she could not find basic over the counter medication that she needed. She knew the brand name of the medication in English, however, she was unfamiliar with the local pharmaceutical brands and she could not read Chinese.

What it does

This mobile app allows users traveling to different countries to find the medication they need. They can input the brand name in the language/country they know and get the name of the same compound in the country they are traveling to. The app provides a list of popular brand names for that type of product, along with images to help the user find the medicine at a pharmacy.

How we built it

We used Beautiful Soup to scrape Drugs.com to create a database of 20 most popular active ingredients in over the counter medication. We included in our database the name of the compound in 6 different languages/countries, as well as the associated brand names in the 6 different countries.

We stored our database on MongoDB Atlas and used Stitch to connect it to our React Native front-end.

Our Android app was built with Android Studio and connected to the MongoDB Atlas database via the Stitch driver.

Challenges we ran into

We had some trouble connecting our React Native app to the MongoDB database since most of our team members had little experience with these platforms. We revised the schema for our data multiple times in order to find the optimal way of representing fields that have multiple values.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how far we got considering how little experience we had. We learned a lot from this Hackathon and we are very proud of what we created. We think that healthcare and finding proper medication is one of the most important things in life, and there is a lack of informative apps for getting proper healthcare abroad, so we're proud that we came up with a potential solution to help travellers worldwide take care of their health.

What we learned

We learned a lot of React Native and MongoDB while working on this project. We also learned what the most popular over the counter medications are and what they're called in different countries.

What's next for SuperMed

We hope to continue working on our MERN skills in the future so that we can expand SuperMed to include even more data from a variety of different websites. We hope to also collect language translation data and use ML/AI to automatically translate drug labels into different languages. This would provide even more assistance to travelers around the world.