Explainasaurus

Medical jargon explanations at your fingertips

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Inspiration

A lot of research papers and articles use a ton of health jargon and talk about complex medical topics. Because of this, they're not easy to understand for the average person. We wanted to make researching health topics more accessible, so we built Explainasaurus to help.

What it does

Explainasaurus has two components. First, it's an extension that you can use on any website to get explanations of complex medical topics without even switching tabs. Second, once you've done some research with the extension, the Explainasaurus website allows you to save the explanations into a summary to view later. Since the newest research might only be published in journals, you can upload PDFs to the website and annotate them just like a normal article. The website also lets you search for similar articles if you want to do more research.

How we built it

The Explainasaurus extension generates explanations by using Gemini API, and the UI is built using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The Explainasaurus website is built on Reflex and Python, and also uses Gemini API to generate the summaries and article recommendations.

Challenges we ran into

One big challenge we ran into was displaying PDFs in Reflex. Because Reflex is a pretty new framework, there were no examples we could find involving PDFs. We had to wrap an NPM library in Reflex's interfaces in order to use it, which worked, but was time-consuming. A second problem was making the extension modify web pages without breaking components. We had to redesign it a few times to get it fully working.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of assembling the full package together! It was cool to test the components of Explainasaurus and see them all working together.

What we learned

We learned a lot about Reflex and how to make an extension. We also learned how to work as a team and how to brainstorm and iterate on ideas. Finally, we learned a lot about Alzheimer’s disease thanks to Explainasaurus! :)

What's next for Explainasaurus

Due to time constraints, we had to sacrifice on a lot of features we wanted to add to Explainasaurus. We would like to build out an account system, and also work more on prompting Gemini. Explainasaurus could be used to translate sections of documents into different languages. We hope to continue further work on Explainasaurus!

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