Inspiration
With recent events, it’s increasingly clear that access to evidence-based health information is really important. We wanted to build something that helped in some way to reduce confusion and misinformation about vaccines. It is a crowded “space” at the moment, so we decided that a way in which an app could stand out is to look ahead to when international travel is possible again.
Pre-COVID we were able to travel to exotic and exciting countries. In preparation for those travels, and to help ensure we kept ourselves and those around us safe, we needed to check for which specific travel vaccines we needed. We would go to multiple websites and filter through chunks of paragraphs just to figure out what we needed to vaccinate for - this was so time-consuming! Ensuring that these sites were evidence-based was another hurdle.
This is where TravelVaccy comes in handy. It's a simple app, with the aim of helping users quickly find the travel vaccine information they need.
What it does
The TravelVaccy app allows you to check which countries require what vaccinations. It allows you to search for your travel destination. Once you do that, you can see a clear list of vaccinations, what they do and whether they are mandatory or recommended.
How we built it
We have used Xcode and Swift to build our app. It is currently a native iOS app.
Challenges we ran into
We realised that there will not be a lot of travel during this time due to COVID. However, this app will definitely be helpful in the future when travel is allowed again. Travel will never be banned forever, so this app will be useful hopefully soon.
Another challenge we faced was getting the vaccine data. We could not find any APIs that have vaccine data for countries, which meant that we have to hardcode our vaccine data (data for only four countries - Australia, Indonesia, Japan and New Zealand - were included in this proof of concept). We researched the vaccines required for each country using evidence-based health and travel-health websites.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Since we are inexperienced with hackathons, we are proud that we have actually made a product. We were not expecting to have anything submitted, but we have surprised ourselves with the amount of work we did on this project, and how much we all were able to learn.
We are also proud of the design of our app with our limited design experience. We decided to keep it clean and simple, which we were very happy with.
What we learned
Creating simple apps was not as simple as we envisioned. Creating an app takes quite a while and a lot of effort. It is also quite difficult to coordinate coding with multiple people, since we all needed to work on the same file, but were worried about merge conflicts.
Another thing that we have learned is that communication in a team is important. We got a lot of work done and also solved problems more efficiently when we were working together on the Discord call.
What's next for TravelVaccy
We would like to see a full implementation of the app and hopefully a release on the App Store. We will need to find a way to get all the evidence-based data for recommended vaccines by country.
References
References Logo - https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/paper-plane_3616639?term=airplane%20paper&page=1&position=21&page=1&position=21&related_id=3616639&origin=search Colour palette - https://dribbble.com/shots/6566847/attachments/6566847-The-Zebra-s-Accessible-Color-Palette?mode=media Vaccinations data - https://immunisationhandbook.health.gov.au/vaccination-for-special-risk-groups/vaccination-for-international-travellers https://www.iamat.org/world-immunization-chart https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel Australia: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/destinations/traveler/none/australia?s_cid=ncezid-dgmq-travel-single-001 Indonesia: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/destinations/traveler/none/indonesia?s_cid=ncezid-dgmq-travel-single-001 Japan: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/destinations/traveler/none/japan?s_cid=ncezid-dgmq-travel-single-001 New Zealand: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/destinations/traveler/none/new-zealand?s_cid=ncezid-dgmq-travel-single-001
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.