Inspiration
Nowadays we have a headache, we gulp down a panadol - without caring about how this affects us with any other medications or drugs we take. This could be as simple as having painkillers after a bad hangover. We routinely, take various combinations of drugs as we move through our days. This is particularly, dangerous when we are on multiple medications. What happens when we add one medicine to the set of prescription drugs that we are already consuming? Does the topical acne cream I am taking affect another medicine I am taking? These are questions that our team attempted to tackle.
What it does
The application aims to let you add various different medicines to a "prescription set", and then informs you whether there may be a danger to taking that particular combination of drugs. Should you be someone who regularly takes prescription drugs our website will let you search for medicines, to better understand their effects, and then save it to your profile. This way you can continue to compare your current set of prescription drugs to another drug that you perhaps wish to take.
How we built it
Our product is a web application. We built the front-end site using React, HTML, and CSS. The backend was made using Firebase, and Flask. We have a small dataset of drugs and their effects on our Firebase database. We also store the various interactions of our drugs. When we compare a set of drugs we do two things. Firstly, we searched through our database for known side effects of taking a combination of drugs. Second, we check whether there may be a possibility that two or more drugs in the set act in a similar manner in a way they may alter or deter the effect of another, and then convey that to the user using a react popup.
Challenges we ran into
Currently, the website is limited by the fact that we are unable to collect and store user data. This meant that it was hard to predict specific interactions of drugs, as that would depend on factors like dosage, and body weight, etc. However, we were able to generally, identify if two drugs may be harmful to consume together with the data we populated.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a team, we appreciate and are most proud of how consistently we put in effort through the hackathon. The team did not have too much experience working with front-end applications.
What we learned
As computer science and software development students we do not often get the opportunity to work on a project that requires some amount of biomedical domain knowledge and apply them to a full-stack web application. And that is what we got to learn in this project.
What's next for Horus
- Incorporating more datasets into the database
- Collecting personal data like height, and weight from the user to get a better estimate of the effect
- Creating informative pages in the medications subsection for each pharmaceutical medicine.
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