We drew our inspiration from the presentation that Dean Delpache gave at the open ceremony about creating innovative safety software. The challenge that he presented to us was "How might we encourage patients to maintain diet and nutrition plans given by their healcare provider?", and that idea resonated with us, so much that it made us change our initial hack idea, into providing a solution to this challenge.
iRL is an android app which connects Health Care Providers (HCP) to their Patients. The HCP will be able to create an account with their patients and set up a nutrition plan, which tracks their activity in following it. The HCP and patients are able to directly communicate via a built in messaging service, so communication is swift and timely. The patients will be able to track their daily progress, and how they are doing relative to the overall nutrition plan goal.
Our team developed this app in android studio, following after many design documents and discussion. After planning a clear design, we were simply able to follow an agile-esque approach for the 23 hours we had to implement it by allocating stories for each member to implement.
For three of the four team members, it was their first hackathon. Naturally, there was a slow start and a lot of learning process to get the team to a functional speed. Production didn't commence for a while, but that was after each team member had a clear role of the purpose and design of iRL, and what they were going to do to contribute.
We are proud of the potential future extension to our idea and how it could be used to make a significant impact on the healthcare industry. Also the three students who it was their first hackathon are proud of the way they were able to form a functional and friendly team. We are all proud of how we learned android studio, and extended our knowledge together
We learned that creating a full android application on hackathons is a bigger challenge than we thought, especially with very little android development background. However, we did learn not only more about android development, but expanded our horizon on nutritional healthcare.
The future is what we had in mind when we started developing iRL. The potential future use is so groundbreaking, that it will be able to change the healthcare industry for the better. We hope that we get an opportunity to extend iRL, so it becomes the industry-wide application that we truly believe that it could become.