Project 4Cast takes advantage of exisiting cellular infrastructures to deliver vital medical information and diagnoses to rural areas in developing countries. Using natural lanuage processing algorithms, 4Cast can respond to any text message anywhere in the world. You can ask 4Cast questions, look up medical information, and receive a diagnosis for your symptoms.
Access to healthcare in an important issue in developing nations. While people in developed nations can visit doctors or easily find treatments via the Internet when faced with illness, those in developing nations having few resources for diagnosing sickness and finding reliable health solutions in areas without many medical practitioners. Furthermore, people in developing nations cannot easily self-diagnose themselves due to the lack of Internet access.
Solving this problem will lead to a large reduction of poverty and disease in developing nations.
In many rural areas in East Africa, people have basic mobile devices with call and SMS features, but lack connection to the Internet. Due to such conditions, a good way to disseminate information to people in these regions is through SMS (texting).
By utilizing these technological constraints, Team 4Cast attempts to tackle the problem of healthcare access by providing a means to diagnose illnesses and steps to treat these illnesses through SMS. By sending in symptoms via SMS through the 4Cast app, these people without access can receive a diagnosis and next steps for combating sickness. 4Cast attempts to mitigate problems with healthcare by providing a venue to access potentially life-saving information and empower those without connection to the internet.
4Cast uses Microsoft's Azure platform to create a web-based application and integrates the text messaging service Twilio. Patients send in descriptions of their symptoms and include information about their age, location, and more. This text can be sent in a colloquial format, in almost any language. 4Cast analyzes this information using Microsoft cloud based machine learning. The 4Cast algorithm seeks to determine the most likely disease given the patient-provided information. 4Cast then replies to the text with a list of the most likely diseases and treatments.
Anyone in the world with a mobile phone, as long as it can send text messages, can use 4Cast in a matter of seconds Note: the actual number to send a text message to has been hidden for now as to prevent cost overload while we are in the early stages of the competition. This number will be provided to competition judges in a private channel.
- Send a text message to 1-123-456-7890. Include any information about your symptoms, your past health, age, location, and so on. You can enter this information as if you were messaging a person - 4Cast can still understand you! Example text: "Yesterday I was bit by a dog, and now I have a fever. I am 25 years and I live in Kenya"
- 4Cast algorithms will try to determine the most likely disease(s) you have, as well as possible cures and routes of treatment.
- You will receive a text message from 4Cast with predictions of the 3 most likely diseases you might have, along with recommendations for treatment. Often times, the most influential technology in the world possesses a seemingly deceptive simplicity. But the power of a text message cannot be over-stated.
Check out the full project at: http://project4cast.azurewebsites.net/