ONNA Women's Health** (女性の健康)
Onna Health is a women's health educational Question & Answer AI-enabled app aimed at solving for United Nations SDG #5 on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. Onna is built using Flutter and FlutterFlow.io, Firebase, and Google Gemini AI API as well as Algolia search.
Generative AI may be helpful at answering health questions, particularly women's health questions. But there is an ongoing need for some type of quality check of the output. ONNA is designed to combine the ease and customization of AI answers supplied by Google Gemini AI for women's health questions, fused with the trust and safety of actual doctors.
Please see our non-technical user stories design video here: https://youtu.be/B6muZqcOD2M
Onna Health is boot-strapped with questions and prompts designed by actual young women and women's health doctors on the team, in order to help guide women of all ages to questions that are not always easy to ask, or easy to remember to ask, in the privacy of their own phones and devices. These are featured in the user stories and demo video. These informed the design of the system.
Trust and safety are important. AI cannot do it all. To help improve the safety and validity of answers generated by Gemini AI, doctors can upvote or downvote answers generated by the platform. Doctors will ideally verify their identity using Doximity OAuth verification, or else manually verify by providing their credentials to ONNA staff for review. Alternatively, having enough social connections to verified doctors on the platform can validate other doctors, especially non-US doctors. (At scale we may use EigenTrust or a more sophisiticated algorithm, but for now we may use a simple threshold like 3 verified acquaintances). By doing this, doctors are recognized for their contribution, and patients can search for doctor-experts who are on the platform and find their Google Maps listings for appointments and more. We anticipate the point system to also be useful for other redemptions in the future, such as directing donations to charities etc.
Our Inspiration
Mariko Ladies Clinic is owned and run by Dr. Mariko Yamada, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Yokohama, Japan. Every day she sees over 100 patients, without any exaggeration. This is because of a shortage of women's health care in general. Her patients love her, but she also could use more time, resources and help to help educate women further about OB/Gyn health issues. Furthermore, in Japan, cervical cancer vaccination ended after 2000, leading to increased rates of cervical cancer since. More education is needed.
Dr. Lorena Benavides is a billingual Latino-American OB/Gyn in North Carolina who cares for women of all ages at Raleigh Gynecology & Wellness. Her special interests include general gynecologic care for women of all ages, birth control counseling, menopause, sexual health and approaches to healthy living. She has a particular interest in women who suffer with pain with intercourse and with reduced libido. She is fluent in Spanish and welcomes patients who may be looking for a bilingual physician. Even though patient education materials are available in many languages, they are not always culturally tailored or sensitive to the needs of her women patients.
Dr. Naomi Hayashi is an ophthalmologist in NYC at Apple Ophthalmology affiliated with Mount Sinai health system. In addition to seeing patients who speak Japanese or Spanish at home, sees patients from many other languages, cultures and backgrounds, alongside the other ophthalmologists and optometrists at Apple Ophthalmology, who serve patients primarily in English, Japanese, Spanish and Polish.
Kimberly "Kimi" Wei is a sophomore at Barnard College, a prestigious all-women's college that is part of Columbia University, known for such graduates at Greta Gerwig who directed the Oscar-nominated Barbie film. Kimi is majoring in Applied Math with a minor in CS and potentially premedical studies. Kimi and a female teammate were jointly awarded "Best Beginner Hack" at her first hackathon at Columbia DevFest '24. (Note: after winning, a male teammate unfairly removed female teammates from the Devpost project, but DevFest judges can confirm.) Kimi has done Robotic Process Automation for medical practice operations in NYC. Kimi would like to make Barbie's visit to the gynecologist a reality and not just Barbieland fiction, for women everywhere.
Isabela Lafleur is a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins University with an intended major in chemical and biological engineering, and possibly pre-medical studies.
In the short-term, the Onna Health team will not be able to provide access to girls / minors due to privacy laws in many jurisdictions protecting children. The demo video reflects this by featuring a parent searching on behalf of their child. However we envision a trust-based, legally-compliant future version that can help further gender equality and empowerment for not just women, but girls as well, in support of U.N. SDG #5.
The team thanks teammate Marcelo LaFleur PhD from the United Nations for helping to provide more context around the SDGs and specifically SDG 5, "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls". The team also thanks coach & low-code technologist Henry Wei MD, who was previously grand prize winner with Nayan Jain of the 2012 Health 2.0 World Developers' Cup for team MedTuner.
Onna Health is a work in progress.
To be honest, we ran short on time, and didn't get to everything we wanted to build, but we hope you like where we are headed. We hope to invite interested supporters to apply for scholarships to support talented students and to donate to the JMSA (Japanese Medical Society of America). JMSA medical student scholarship recipients have been able to work on sustained contributions every year, and they can also be supported to develop apps like ONNA to help women of not just Japanese backgrounds, but all languages and backgrounds.
We are also looking at options to build Onna Health for real if there is enough interest and support via the Apple Appuru Foundation (applefound.org), a 501c3 charitable non-profit organization.
Please see the non-demo Family Story Video here
Thank you for your consideration.
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