In our country, people are always taking medicines in their own without even consulting doctors. As a result, they sometimes take medicine which unbeknownst to them do more harm than good because they might have a certain disease or the medicines are not supposed to be taken together. This motivated us to build an application that will help people in not taking drugs that clash with each other or harmful due to a certain health condition that they have.
This software product is developed for patients; keeping in mind the situation of Bangladesh. In our country, most of the people go to the doctors however they like. This causes a problem which is, the doctors who are prescribing the medicines for the same patient do not have any idea what the other doctors have prescribed. As a result, there could be prescribed medicines which could potentially clash with each other. This could be fatal. Our application can alert users if they are taking medicines which clash with each other or if the medicine they are taking might not be suitable for them because of their certain health conditions.
For example, one should not take medicines with the same ingredients from different vendors or brands [1]. Suppose someone is taking Napa for some reason, he/she should not take Ace or other medicine which have the same chemical ingredient that is Paracetamol. Also if someone has heart condition he/she should not take any nerve relaxant or medicines related to a nerve.
Theoretically, it should not be a problem, because the right way of medical procedure is that, every physician must have to check the details a medical history of the patient they are treating. But in our country, very few people have a complete medical history report and fewer who will carry them when going to a new physician! So our physicians have no way of knowing what the patient is currently taking and often they have no way of knowing which medical condition the patient has other than very obvious one (e.g. pregnancy) or the one they are treating. So we think our application is a very necessary thing for our county. It can save lives. Many people die or suffer terribly just because of this issue in our country.
We were able to accomplish the following objectives -
- To build a smartphone application that would be able to alert users if they are taking medicines that are not supposed to be taken together that is the medicines clashes with each other.
- The application would also be able to alert the user if he/she is taking a medicine that might be problematic due to his/her health condition (such as heart disease, high blood pressure, etc.)
- To implement an OCR method into the application so that user would be able to add medicine by just scanning the name of the medicine.
- To provide cloud and sync functionality so that user would be able to access his/her account from any device by just log in.
Even though our application is only available for the Android platform right now, our future goal is to make it available on other platforms such as IOS, Chrome Os, and Website etc