Check out our functioning, deployed web app here: www.samarit.tech
Created for HackDuke 2020 by:
- Huilang Chen, UMD ’21
- Sam Kim, Duke ’21
- Quentin MacFarlane, Duke ’24
- Kevin Yin, Duke ’24
- Andy Zhou, Duke ’24
Health
Time is of the essence in emergencies. However, sometimes when people are in an emergency and call 911, they are put on hold while their call is being transferred or until an operator is available. Moreover, due to COVID-19, the average wait time to reach a 911 dispatcher increased from 9 seconds to 25 seconds. Additionally, concise first aid information is not accessible on the internet. Knowing what to do in emergencies is critical to helping a person survive. Thus, we wanted to create an app that would help a person provide quick and effective first aid to another person in need.
Samaritan has three functions: medical emergency triage, mental health triage, and quick access. Medical emergency triage walks the user through steps to determine what first aid to perform on a person in need. Mental health triage does the same, but for mental health crises. Quick access allows users to find a specific emergency (e.g. stroke) and easily find what first aid to administer.
We did research into different types of medical and mental health emergencies and the type of first aid that needs to be administered in each situation. This app was built through javascript and react with Material-UI. We created our own CSS and components with pathways that return specific actions in response to the user inputs.
A challenge was to determine what aid to perform in mental health crises. Resources are scant on the internet, so it was a challenge to find in-depth, medically-supported material.
The app is intuitive and easy to use. It is aesthetically pleasing and provides quick access to a wide variety of situations where immediate first aid is needed. The explanations for how to administer the first aid are thorough and easy to understand, but not too long so as to waste time.
We learned about different steps to gauge what first aid to administer, and we learned that mental health crises are hard to tackle because there is a lot of ambiguity around when to call 911.
We want to deploy the app for testing and receive feedback.
JavaScript and React.js.