## Inspiration

Our inspiration for EduMates was our own experience struggling with courses, as being lost involving certain topics unable to obtain help from overcrowded study sessions, conflicting office hours or lack of a social group to study with. EduMates was made to remedy that problem by providing a easy to use solution.

## What it does

Edumate first allows users to provide personal information involving courses, goals, alongside other social links. Within each course, a user can opt to decide which topics and courses they are comfortable with learning or teaching. Users can then make requests to form study groups or one-on-ones with other students based on matchmaking with what each student excels and lacks, to promote effective learning and socialization to accommodate when school facilities cannot.

## How we built it

We used Next.js, the full-stack framework that builds on top of React. TypeScript was a must, as usual. Can't go back to JavaScript once you've touched TyepScript! TailwindCSS for styling, makes writing CSS 0x faster since you're no longer writing CSS. MongoDB for super fast database queries along with Prisma ORM for an amazing developer experience! Shadcn/UI for the most flexible, accessible, and customizable UI components! Auth.js for authentication. Last but not least, AWS S3 for uploading images!

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the state of the final product in how faithful it is to the original idea and designs made in the early stages of the project.

## Challenges we ran into

A lot of the challenges we ran into were on the dot, and during development, we encountered roadblocks involving styling, formatting, and code bugs. These slowed our development as we had to search for fixes, or learn entirely new things to solve, but, by working together as a group and utilizing each person's strength in certain topics, we overcame these challenges.

## What we learned

For the project, a majority of the coding was spent on problem-solving and learning libraries/usage cases on the fly, which really helped us improve the way we learned coding topics overall, as well as how they are applied.

## What's next for EduMates

In future iterations, we would like to add a rating system, alongside a point system to help make an incentive to help others alongside allowing people to know how well others are on campus
## Inspiration

Since last year, students and education institutions faced the challenge of COVID 19. While some decisions need to be made swiftly like locking down, other major policy changes about academics and mental health would surely be better if decision makers had input from all their students. Of course, many students did use social media to voice their opinions but we wanted our suggestions to our schools and universities to have real weight. We thought there should be a way for all students to participate in making decisions that affect them. We were inspired by the [vTaiwan initiative](https://info.vtaiwan.tw/), which used related crowdsourcing techniques to get input, suggestions and feedback on government laws. We believe a similar consultative process will result in better decisions by school administrators. Furthermore, we were also inspired by our personal experiences with the education system. We felt many times that we wanted give out suggestions but had no solid platform to say it on.

## What it does

Our web app allows students and faculty at an institution to discuss issues. We divide the topics into broad categories such as mental health or pandemic safety. Within a category such as mental health, there are subtopics such as counseling services or workload concerns. Participants can post suggestions addressing these subtopics, for example a proposal to ensure the quality of counseling services. Participants can also choose to agree or disagree with statements. Suggestions with widespread support are taken into consideration by staff and can be used to inform policies.

## How we built it

We built the frontend using HTML5 and CSS3, it was also designed using the design tool Figma. Finally, we built the backend using Django web framework, which also uses python.

## Challenges we ran into

One challenge that we run was merge conflicts while using Git

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud at how quickly and well designed the frontend was. Furthermore, this will also be first web application we've launched live

## What we learned

We've learned that communication is key. When we communicated we were able to resolve our issues regarding Git. Since everybody knew who was commiting or coding or about to push code nobody's code merging conflicted with each other.

## What's next for EduForums

The next logical step for EduForums would be having an actual student and education staff userbase. Also, it would be nice to have our website featured on an university's or school board's official website. We would also like to expand and improve features, such as fact sheets to aid students in their decisions and a page to quickly view the most popular suggestions.
## Reimagining Patient Education and Treatment Delivery through Gamification

Imagine walking into a doctors office to find out you’ve been diagnosed with a chronic illness. All of a sudden, you have a slew of diverse healthcare appointments, ongoing medication or lifestyle adjustments, lots of education about the condition and more. While in the clinic/hospital, you can at least ask the doctor questions and try to make sense of your condition & management plan. But once you leave to go home, **you’re left largely on your own**.

We found that there is a significant disconnect between physicians and patients after patients are discharged and diagnosed with a particular condition. Physicians will hand patients a piece of paper with suggested items to follow as part of a "treatment plan". But after this diagnosis meeting, it is hard for the physicians to keep up-to-date with their patients on the progress of the plan. The result? Not surprisingly, patients **quickly fall off and don’t adhere** to their treatment plans, costing the healthcare system **upwards of $300 billion** as they get readmitted due to worsening conditions that may have been prevented.

But it doesn’t have to be that way…

We're building an engaging end-to-end experience for patients managing chronic conditions, starting with one of the most prevalent ones - diabetes. **More than 100 million U.S. adults are now living with diabetes or prediabetes**

## How does Glucose Guardian Work?

Glucose Guardian is a scalable way to gamify education for chronic conditions using an existing clinical technique called “teachback” (see here- [link](https://patientengagementhit.com/features/developing-patient-teach-back-to-improve-patient-education)). We plan to partner with clinics and organizations, scrape their existing websites/documents where they house all their information about the chronic condition, and instantly convert that into short (up to 2 min) voice modules.

Glucose Guardian users can complete these short, guided, voice-based modules that teach and validate their understanding of their medical condition. Participation and correctness earn points which go towards real-life rewards for which we plan to partner with rewards organizations/corporate programs.

Glucose Guardian users can also go to the app to enter their progress on various aspects of their personalized treatment plan. Their activity on this part of the app is also incentive-driven.

This is inspired by current non-health solutions our team has had experience with using very low barrier audio-driven games that have been proven to drive user engagement through the roof.

## How we built it

We've simplified how we can use gamification to transform patient education & treatment adherence by making it more digestible and fun. We ran through some design thinking sessions to work out how we could create a solution that wouldn’t simply look great but could be implemented clinically and be HIPAA compliant.

We then built Glucose Guardian as a native iOS application using Swift. Behind the scenes, we use Python toolkits to perform some of our text matching for patient education modules, and we utilize AWS for infrastructure needs.

## Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to navigate the pre-existing market of patient adherence apps and create a solution that was unique and adaptable to clinical workflow. To tackle this, we dedicated ample time to step through user journeys - patients, physicians and allied health professionals. Through this strategy, we identified education as our focus because it is critical to treatment adherence and a patient-centric solution.

## We're proud of this

We've built something that has the potential to fulfill a large unmet need in the healthcare space, and we're excited to see how the app is received by beta testers, healthcare partners, and corporate wellness organizations.

## Learning Points

Glucose Guardian has given our cross-disciplined team the chance to learn more about the intersection of software + healthcare. Through developing speech-to-text features, designing UIs, scraping data, and walking through patient journeys, we've maximized our time to learn as much as possible in order to deliver the biggest impact.

## Looking Ahead

As per the namesake, so far we've implemented one use case (diabetes) but are planning to expand to many other diseases. We'd also like to continue building other flows beyond patient education. This includes components such as the gamified digital treatment plan which can utilize existing data from wearables and wellness apps to provide a consolidated view on the patient's post-discharge health.
Beyond that, we also see potential for our platform to serve as a treasure trove of data for clinical research and medical training. We're excited to keep building and keep creating more impact.