Inspiration
The other month I needed to get a covid test, and in an effort to find one I ended up having to go to three different pharmacies. In fact, this is not an isolated phenomenon; for all sorts of health commodities with periodic availability it is difficult to find a simple way to access the available resources. Indeed, this is an issue for many different health products, such as covid tests, Narcan, baby formula and cold medication. Thus the task of trying to find necessary products has become cumbersome, complicated, and inaccessible to many. This issue is compounded by the variety of different stores and inaccurate stock reporting information.
What it does
It provides both product finding and reporting capacities. On the reporting side, it allows users to submit data on the availability of crucial health supplies when they go to buy them. Its most powerful capacity though is the ability to direct users to optimal ways of finding their products. Users can input their desired starting location, and given the crowd sourced reports, we calculate the probability of finding the desired resource at each nearby pharmacy (which we pull from maps API). We then suggest a path (an order to visit the stores in) that minimizes the expected travel time of our users, so they know how to optimally find their products.
How we built it
We used a full stack, combining Azure App Service, Azure Cosmos DB, Mongo DB, Open API , Swaggerhub, Swift, SwiftUI, MapKit, Google Maps API, Tornado and Python Motor Driver.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge we faced was learning how to use Swift. No one from our team had ever done iOS development, so this was a large hurdle to overcome. Additionally, our optimization problem is NP-Hard, which challenged us to think outside of the box to come up with good solutions.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of the completeness of our application. Our app is a large-scale full stack application which is fully deployed and ready to use.
What we learned
We learned the importance of communicating early and often so that everyone's individual components fit together with minimal friction.
What's next for Flux
We would like to extend the map capabilities of Flux, perhaps by visualizing routes, for example.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.