PillPal
Medication-related errors account for 44% of all patient harm and injury. We created a mobile platform that empowers the elderly population to better understand and easily identify their medicines.
Hackathon Project for Hack@Brown 2025đ»
Inspiration
Millions of elderly individuals struggle with identifying their medications, understanding side effects, and navigating complex drug interactions. The inspiration for our project stems from team members witnessing grandparents struggling to understand and use smartphone interfaces, often getting lost in complex navigation and small font sizes. To make things easier for this demographic, our team tried tackling this problem with an intuitive AI-powered app that makes medication management effortless.
What It Does
Users can simply take a photo of their pill, and our app instantly identifies the drug, providing clear and accessible informationâincluding descriptions, side effects, and potential interactions. We also integrated text-to-speech to read out the medication details, making it easier for users with reading difficulties to access crucial information effortlessly.
How We Built It
We use AI for pill recognition and summarization. The backend crawls medication data from Drugs.com, while the front end delivers a seamless user experience. The system is designed for full-stack deployment, ensuring accessibility and efficiency.
Challenges We Ran Into
Understanding the user experience and designing an interface that is intuitive for elderly individuals were key challenges. Ensuring high accuracy in pill recognition and reliable data retrieval also required fine-tuning our AI model and backend system.
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
By making medication lookup as simple as taking a picture, we empower elderly individuals to take control of their health with confidence and ease. Weâre not just building an appâweâre redefining healthcare accessibility for millions.
What We Learned
- The importance of designing for accessibility, especially for elderly users.
- Optimizing AI for real-world pill recognition is challenging but achievable.
- Reliable drug information retrieval requires robust backend architecture.
What's Next for PillPal
- Expanding the AI model to recognize more medications with greater accuracy.
- Integrating voice assistance for hands-free interaction.
- Developing personalized health monitoring features based on medication history.
- Partnering with healthcare providers to enhance medication safety and adherence.
Published: 2025-02-01