Inspiration
It started with when one of the team members went to the doctor with their grandparents. The doctor prescribed both of them with a page full of different medicines. Each medicine had different instructions - take before meal, after meal, twice,three,four time a day. To someone one the outside, it seemed absolutely overwhelming to have to keep track of so many medications. So, we created an app to help a patient take their prescriptions.
What it does
When the user opens the app, they are greeted with two options - add a prescription and view prescriptions. If they click add a prescription, it allows the user to take a photo of their prescription label. Then using Microsoft Azure OCR APIs, we transcribed the words from the prescription into a string which we then parsed. From that we lifted important things to know about the medication: name, dosage, and timing/duration. The user can then confirm if the text is correct and then it gets send into a calendar for future notifications.
How we built it
It is mainly built in Android-Studio using Java to communicate with the API and to provide the backend. The frontend was done with basic XML. Then for storage of the list of prescriptions for the patient, a SQL lite database was used.
Challenges we ran into
We started this project with only 1 of the 4 group members having experience developing android apps before. So we immediately ran into a hurdle of not knowing how to even set up android-studio. Also, the OCR API we were using to read the image and create the text was not very accurate, so it was very hard to parse the text as it rarely generated usable text - a major problem since this is a core part of the app.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We managed to complete the main functionality of the app - the ability read in, parse and then work with the text from an image taken by the user. We also were able to create this app with very little previous experience. We were also able to pull through and change out the API we were using, as our original one was not good enough and was simply too inaccruate.
What we learned
From a technical perspective, we learned a lot about working with Android and it's different quirks. But I think the most important thing we learned from this was how important planning is. Because of some time spent planning the different parts we need to do and then dividing it up accordingly to our interests and strrengths, we were able to finish most of the project within a decent timeline.
What's next for PreScript
Some of us will definitely continue to add to this project, especially since it was the first dipping of our toes into mobile development for some of us, we manage to hack an app together, but there's so much more to learn regarding how we can make the code better and make the app run more effectively.
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