😷🦠 Inspiration
Ensuring that everyone has the ability to book a COVID-19 vaccine is important, now more than ever. The process of booking a vaccine through pharmacies can be long and tedious, as users must navigate to each individual pharmacy site to view availability. Regardless of organizations such as Vaccine Hunters Canada which aid eligible Canadians in finding vaccines, finding a spot to a vaccination appointment locally is still almost impossible. Our project, VaxAlert, aims to address this by allowing users the opportunity to select a location and receive a text message and email notification when any pharmacy in that region has available vaccine times.
💉 What it does
The premise of our project is based around a user-friendly, responsive webpage where visitors can enter their contact information, needed vaccine type, and location. While storing this information, a web scraping program would be used to flag when vaccine appointments become available on a pharmacy website. Based on the collected information, a notification will then be sent to the appropriate people by text and email. This eliminates the burden of constantly checking several different pharmacy websites and signing up for dozens of waitlists individually, allowing the community to become better protected from the pandemic.
🛠 How we built it
Frontend: Webpage and form created with ReactJS and Bootstrap.
Backend: Express backend created using node.js. Determined vaccine availability using an API request. Stored form data on MongoDB
Messaging: Messaging feature created using the Twilio SMS API.
🚧 Challenges we ran into
Learning curve: With every hackathon comes a learning curve, whether it is learning new programming languages or maintaining a balance between attending workshops while networking to get the most of the event. That being said, we struggled a bit at the start when learning new tech, but we're proud of what we were able to build!
Installing Dependencies: Slowed us down a bit, but we made it through <3
Despite these challenges, our group was able to collaborate, problem-solve, and produce a creative and highly applicable solution by delivering different components that are unique to our project.
🥳 Accomplishments and Lessons Learned
- Despite the fact that we were unable to complete the integration of the frontend and backend components of our project in the given time, we were able to establish some parts of our project as standalone features.
- Given that this was the first hackathon for some of our group members, this hackathon was a good learning experience and gave us the opportunity to work efficiently and use our resources in a smart way :)
➡️ What's next for VaxAlert
Overall, There is great potential for a program such as VaxAlert to be used in the community, either in relation to COVID or future widely used vaccines.
Specific Steps
- Expand our pharmacy list: We could only build for one pharmacy chain during SheHacks, but we want to reach more cities and more chains like Shoppers or Rexall
- User response: Develop an option for the person to reply to the message to stop further alerts -Distance feature
- Make VaxAlert more accessible for all: Ensure that the colour scheme and font sizes are considerate to those with disabilities, or let them be modified
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.