forget med-not

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  screenshot of web-app

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  screenshot of messages

Inspiration

Our team was inspired by planning applications such as Google Calendar and Notion, as well as mindfulness/reminder apps. We also looked to common issues we experienced as the basis of this project and settled on medication/nutrition, as it’s often difficult to keep up with these aspects of personal health as a busy college student.

What it does

This web application allows users to set up customized text reminders with information on the medication they need to take, how much of it to take, and a short description/note about it. These reminders can be set to a specific time interval (e.g. every 12 hours) over a period of time (e.g. 3 months).

How we built it

Forget Med-Not utilizes the Twilio API to send messages via SMS. It was implemented using Python and Flask, and then integrated into the front-end with JavaScript and React. We worked on both areas of development simultaneously, then combined them at the end.

Challenges we ran into

We had different levels of experience with different languages and areas of development, so a lot of time, in the beginning, was spent planning and trying to account for each other’s weaknesses instead of capitalizing on each other’s strengths. Of course, it’s great to learn new skills (which we all indeed did), but attempting to learn something in such a short time frame is not always productive. It was difficult to streamline processing the POST requests sent through JavaScript in our Python code, as there were many incompatibilities between the type of data that had to be sent across different platforms. Designing the UI was also challenging and very time-consuming.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we created a functional application in the end. It might not look or work the best, but it works (and looks)! This was the first hackathon for 3 out of the 4 of us, and the first in-person hackathon for all of us. As freshmen, we don’t have much experience collectively (and what experience we do have is spread across multiple areas), so it took a lot of work to figure out how to do different things and allocate tasks to each person. Though it was incredibly difficult at times to keep going, we managed to pull through and each contribute something unique to the project.

What we learned

All of us gained new experience in some aspect of development, whether it was in ideation and planning, design, or programming skills. For instance, most of us didn’t have any experience in React prior to this. Those who were more accustomed to working on algorithms were thrown into HTML/CSS, and vice versa. It was challenging, but a great learning opportunity overall.

What's next for Forget Med-Not


The team intends to expand the functionality of Forget Med-Not in terms of interactivity with the interface and sending different kinds of alerts so that they might not only be limited to medication reminders. We’d also like to implement a database for storing these reminders and for account creation support. Another goal would be to polish up the UI and some of the pre-existing backend processes.

Built With

• css3
• flask
• html5
• javascript
• nextjs
• python
• react
• twilio