Eggi | Devpost

Inspiration

While brainstorming ideas for the different paths provided, we wanted to approach and solve a problem that all of us will face in the future. When it comes to physical health, people often think about staying fit and their outer physical health, but they overlook their internal physical health. Physically taking care of our organs is extremely important which is why it inspired us to create a program that will help women fight inequality in the healthcare system by ensuring that their symptoms and pain regarding their internal physical health are taken seriously. Our program takes in symptoms that the women are facing and gives them a potential disorder that may be at risk for, along with further steps to take to confirm the diagnosis. This was important for us to add as many times, the disorders that we have included in the program go undiagnosed in women as they are passed off as period pain, and aren’t diagnosed until a much later stage, thus making it harder to treat.

What it does

In our program, women can input symptoms they are experiencing and get a list of potential disorders that they may be at risk for. They also enter in factors such as age and medications to account for any symptoms that are consequential to the factors. Once they enter in the symptoms, they receive a possible disorder they might have with specific tests that they should get for a professional diagnosis from a doctor.

How we built it

We built this program using python, Replit, and GUI. First, we defined a dictionary of symptoms that the user may have, and then we defined several disorders using certain symptoms. Second, we defined functions to ask the user their age, medications, and symptoms. Lastly, we defined a function that iterates through every symptom and checks to see if the user had it and attributes it to a specific disorder. If the user is at risk for a certain disorder, the program will display a message including the disorder, a short definition, and the next step that the user can take. We also included functions that checked to see if the user is on menopause, has irregularities because of their age, or if they have symptoms because of their medications.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges while making this program. First, we wanted to call local variables outside of a specific function, so we learned how to make a local variable into a global variable within the function. Second, we wanted to create lists of symptoms and disorders, but it was not working inside of our code in the way we thought it would. So, we discovered that we could use dictionaries in python, and we transferred our lists into a dictionary, which was cleaner and easier to work with. Another challenge we ran into was figuring out how to use GUI, which is a way for users to interact with our program through icons and buttons.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We took the issue of women’s symptoms often being misdiagnosed as just “period pain” and created a program that can check through their symptoms and give them recommendations for their future steps to get a professional diagnosis for a disorder that they may be at risk for having. We are proud that we were able to come up with an idea that is helping solve a problem that is prevalent in our society as this is something that affects millions of people around the world, and we hope to change that. We are also proud that we were able to successfully utilize GUI as we had never used it before, but in the past 36 hours, we learned how to use it and it enhanced our program immensely.

What we learned

We learned that in python, you can make dictionaries that function similar to lists, but are more versatile than lists. The items in that dictionary can be used in several different lists throughout our program, which was very helpful for our code. We also learned how to use a GUI in python, which allowed us to make our program output cleaner and incorporate buttons and windows.

What's next for Eggi

Eggi hopes to expand to a much larger program with a larger list of possible disorders with even more in depth future steps to take. Additionally, our program currently focuses on just cisgender women, however in the future, Eggi will expand to be inclusive to all menstruating people including non-binary people and transgender people. Upon further research, Eggi will account for hormonal medications that transgender or non-binary people may be taking and utilize that information to provide a more accurate diagnosis. Eggi also strives to make the interface more user friendly so that people all around the world can use it.