PillPal

Inspiration

Think about the times you've been taking some sort of prescription, and you find yourself questioning whether or not you already took the medication. Most abled bodied people don't think twice about it, and rightfully so because to them it is not a huge issue. However, you should think about those who are elderly, are on the autistic spectrum or have any other mental impairment (ADHD, Dementia, etc). Ensuring that the proper medication is taken appropriately is crucial for some, and that is what inspired PillPal. The team has experience working with individuals with special needs. For instance, Josh taught children with ASD and ADHD as a swim instructor for a couple of years. Moreover, Kevin has worked as a pharmacy assistant, and understand the many types of prescriptions, as well as the importance of them. So, we as a team understand the need for a solution for the intersection of these circumstances. We want to guarantee the safety for those who rely on taking their medication in a timely manner.

What it does

Notifies the patient when they need to take their medication with LED light alerts on their medication box. Nurses/caretakers are able to perform administrative duties on the web application. SMS messages are sent to the patient when they need to take their medication. If the medication is not taken in a given window then the caretaker will receive an SMS message.

How we built it

Our app is built on a NextJS frontend (React framework), hosted on Vercel, that uses Firebase to authenticate caretakers in our app. Which interacts with a Golang backend, running on Cloud Run in GCP which was containerized with Docker, in order to make calls to our PostgresSQL database (in the cloud on Supabase). We also take advantage of Twilio in order to quickly schedule and make SMS text messages to caretakers and patients to remind them about taking medication. For our hardware component we used an arduino board with embedded C for the logic behind the displays and controls.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the hack, we ran into several issues involving both hardware and software. In terms of our hardware challenges, we weren't able to find an ethernet shield which was a vital part of our idea as it would have been responsible for sending http requests to our backend. This led to a compromised final product as we did not have the full core functionalities we planned to make. Another dilemma related to hardware were our LED's. As we tried soldering our LED's, we quickly realized it wasn't a viable path as most of them burnt out. On the Software side of things the team had security configuration issues. This was during the front-back-end integration phase where the client side NextJS server had to make HTTP requests to the backend through a RESTAPI. However Golang was strict on accessibility to the server, meaning only permitted domains are allowed to make requests. The team came together, did our research, and collectively found a solution where the front end domain was given permissions to send and fetch data from the backend server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to utilize a plethora of modern technologies at the forefront of innovation. The team was able to adapt and preserver through hurdles of bugs/issues by working together and using critical thinking.

What we learned

We learned the importance of being able to adapt quickly, as our initial idea for the hardware aspect of our hack was drastically different than how it ended up. Moreover, we saw how effective problem solving as a collective group is, rather than strictly dividing the work and keeping to ourselves. In many situations we found ourselves all discussing and contributing ideas to wiggle out of problems. Finally, we learned another priceless lesson, which is: "perfect is the enemy of good". Chasing perfection is always desired, but it can be a bottle neck to providing value to society, even though the product may not be perfect. So, the team learned how to make smart compromises, and constantly play to our strengths to ship value out to communities.

What's next for PillPal

Scale the application for widespread use and manufacturing of the hardware. For instance use in the healthcare industry to reduce effort needed for nurses, caregivers, and patients across the world. Furthermore, with more time and resources make the hardware have improved quality of life features; such as automated opening and closing mechanisms for the pill capsules.