Curea

I am aiming for a solution for the complete care of people suffering from rare diseases. This includes aiding in the ongoing treatment of any patient, mental support and morale boost, reducing stigma around such rare diseases, making accurate information more accessible to the public and making healthcare systems more accessible for people from the backward classes of the society. Today over 400 million people suffer from rare diseases of all kinds.

My solution Curea is a mobile application for complete holistic care for people suffering from rare diseases. The application would be extremely beneficial to patients suffering from rare diseases.

In this app, patients can sign up for an account. In the beginning, they are asked for a diagnosis of their symptoms and the problems they are facing, as well as if they currently have access to a doctor. After that, patients can log in to their accounts.

Doctors can also sign up for a special caregiver account in the application. They need to undergo verification to get access to such an account. Each doctor can connect to their patient on the app. Next, the doctor can assign a daily time schedule as a prescription for the patient with the correct medications and exercises at the correct time for the patient. The app will set up timers for those times and alert the patient about the time to complete any activity for their treatment.

The app will keep track of all the used activities for the person and take feedback on their effectiveness. This data would be stored and would be shown to other doctors to help them with the diagnosis and treatment of other patients. The names and other personal information would be kept completely confidential for privacy concerns, and any patient would have the right to opt out of sharing their data with other people.

In the app, the patients can connect with other patients from all around the world. They can learn from each other’s experiences, share various information, or simply talk and forge a bond of a community. It would help in the morale boost of the patient.

The patients can also connect with a chatbot that would talk with them whenever they feel to talk. It would be a responsive chatbot that would properly listen to and reply with encouraging and happy messages to reduce the negative feelings in the patient’s mind.

There would also be an “Information” page in the application. This page would provide factually checked information about such diseases to the patients in an easy-to-understand format, which would allow for people to access quality and correct information, and reduce the stigma around such rare diseases. It would also contain inspirational healthcare-related news articles to help boost the morale of the patient.

The people who belong to backward classes of the society, or who simply do not have access to a proper healthcare system can also benefit from this app. Such people can request to be connected with a doctor on the application. A doctor can see all the requests at a moment and can choose to accept any request of such patients. The doctor can then help the patient free of cost in an online manner. As there are many more such patients than available doctors, to reduce the pressure on doctors, the app, via an AI model, can check the reported symptoms of a patient and match them with previous patients to find a schedule that would work for the patient. If, however, the schedule does not work for the patient, then the patient can go forward with his request to connect with a doctor.

I have completed a prototype of the app in Android Studio and Java

My solution serves any and every person suffering from any rare disease. It can also be extended to many other types of chronic illnesses as well.

My solution works by bridging the gap in the healthcare system by using technology. As I am a mobile application developer, I can design and complete this application.

I am a high school student and I came up with the idea of Curea. I have developed a small prototype of the application. I think that the idea has the potential to help many people all around the globe, suffering from rare diseases. Hence, I ask you to provide me with mentorship to help me complete and deploy the application.

My solution is a one stop destination to provide for all the needs of patients suffering from rare diseases. It provides a centralized system that links not only the doctors with each other and allowing them to share their findings, but also for the patients to talk with each other, share how they overcome their personal challenges and rise over the stigma’s of the diseases and different experiences. It would also provide for a centralized database to share, add and utilize various diagnosis, symptoms and their possible treatment methods.

The progress towards my impact goals can be identified by the following statistics:

• Number of users of the applications
• Number of patients using the app
• Number of doctors using the app
• Satisfactory ratio (People who are satisfied from the app/Total users)

My theory of change is providing a centralized system where all of the needs of a patient suffering from a rare disease, are completed.

The application at its core is built using Android Studio and Java. It also has integrations of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

My solution requires very less amount of funding. The only costs to deploy it would be the operational costs of the Firebase server, which is around $11 per month for the near future. As the operational costs are low, the business model to run the solution would be via crowdfunding and crowdsourcing.

To become financially sustainable, the application Curea would be crowdsourced and crowdfunded.