Inspiration
Food allergies are a prevalent chronic hidden ailment that is often missed. They've been connected in studies to greater rates of sadness, stress, and anxiety (between 1.6 and 2.3 times more likely), resulting in a lower quality of life. One out of every thirteen children has a food allergy, and 40% of children with one food allergy also have another, causing additional concern for parents. It's a disease with potentially fatal short-term consequences, but chronic stress has definite long-term consequences. The simple act of dining in a restaurant can be dangerous. When placing an order for meals, the customer must remember each allergy and its severity, while the server must remember the allergens that may be present in each dish.That's a human and imperfect procedure, but with Covid-19, eateries are turning to online menus linked to QR codes, which adds a new stumbling block to the process.
What it does
This is where aversion enters the picture. It is an online menu that is allergy-friendly. Users can examine menus from participating restaurants and import their allergy info from external health providers. Each potentially risky menu item is highlighted with its relative potential severity, obviating the need for the aforesaid error-prone and time-consuming procedures.
How we built it
We used InterSystem's IRIS data store and API to create it. We used IRIS to quickly create a health provider on AWS, and then we populated it with seed users that each had their own set of allergies. IRIS serves as an identification as well as a health store. When a user visits Allenu for the first time, they must first log in using their IRIS ID, after which we send a GET request to IRIS to retrieve their name and allergies. When a user views a menu, we load the menu items from our own database, cross-reference their allergies with IRIS, and present a menu with properly unsafe foods indicated.
Challenges we ran into
It took some time to get to know the IRIS API, however at the InterSystems sponsor booth, we had some engineers walk us through the deployment process and API reference material.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're happy to use IRIS because it provides us with FHIR-formatted data. Our programme could simply be extended to use any external health provider because FHIR is an industry-standard format for health data. We're particularly delighted to have included technology that allows users to add and erase allergies by sending them to IRIS, giving them control over their own health.
What we learned
The sheer magnitude of the mental health effects of allergies, as well as their silent ubiquity, was a huge lesson for us. On the technical side, we learned how to serve complicated user requests by integrating data from both remote services and local data stores.
What's next for aversion
We haven't yet triumphed! We're looking at automating data input with web scraping so restaurants can add their own menus even faster. Integrating with other health providers will necessitate the creation of a user data authorisation route, which is something we'd like to do as well.
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