Rapidemics : An Android App Built With Android Java and Google Firebase and Python connected to Firebase Realtime Database
The inspiration for our app was one of our teammates' family members had died unfortunately of a hospital-acquired infection and to ensure the proper conditions of the hospital rooms and to keep track of info in a proper way. This really helped us think about the advantages and disadvantages hospitals have.
Our app, Rapidemics, tracks all the info regarding a patient and their patient history regarding symptoms and date visited for the hospital and keeps all the info stored in the firebase database.
We built Rapidemics using Firebase using Google and Java for the programming language which the app is based in Android and is the main language for it and We used alot of libraries provided by Firebase like Firebase Auth, Firebase Realtime Database and Crashlytics to see when and if the app crashes. We also used python to generate a script that calculated the percentage of each infection or disease patients had among a certain number of rooms of a hospital and we inputted a series of diseases and were able to do math to generate those percentages and lastly we had to connect it to firebase database to display the percentages of infections that the numbe rof patients in each room have.
The challenges We ran into were connecting the app to Firebase and most importantly the Version Control for Git which caused us a lot of problems such as which version of code to use and how to push it to Github. We also had trouble with integrating our python script with the firebase database and we thought it wasn't possible for we already were working on our main project in Java for the android portion of the app. We also faced trouble with the Gradle versions and had constantly update it.
We are proud to be able to make a tool that is useful in hospitals, potentially saving lives. We are also proud to have used things that we haven't used before; such as servers and a nice looking, user-friendly app
We learned a lot of firebase tools and I feel a lot more equipped to work with servers in the future. We also learned a lot of Java, front-end and back-end. We also learned that repl.it is not the best for some of us with bad internet connections :)
One of our group members did extensive research on medical information and has talked to real-life doctors. However, Rapedemics, right now, is only built by us, high schoolers; so the medical knowledge is not exactly very precise. A next step would be to further enhance the diagnosis steps in our project. As well, currently, we are using firebase and everything is on one server; we can get a server for each hospital that uses it. We plan to start in our local community by starting in smaller hospitals and working our way up.