About

What is Healthical?

Healthical is a simple, easy-to-use website for people to see an accurate evaluation of their risk of contracting a cardiovascular disease and recommendations for them to reduce this risk. Currently, there are platforms where one can input their diet or their blood pressure and get information and feedback off of it. Our website integrates a variety of information so that all of the data is in one place and the user can get one composite understandable score at the end. Instead of the user navigating across multiple websites and applications, Healthical takes a few minutes to input all the necessary information and produces an accurate and realistic chance of the user having a heart attack in the near future.

Conception:

With his grandma, grandpa, and uncle all having major cardiovascular diseases, one of our teammates was worried that he may be susceptible to these diseases as well. When searching online for a way in which he could accurately determine his chance at getting these diseases, he found the process not only to be non-holistic, but of targeting simply one cardiovascular disease, rather than all cardiovascular diseases in general. The suggestions offered by these sites were either insufficient, only focused on a particular aspect of cardiovascular health, or non-existent. The need for an accurate, all-encompassing prediction system for cardiovascular disease susceptibility had presented itself, and upon presenting this idea to his teammates, they determined that change was paramount. An opportunity to implement this idea came in the form of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology's annual Hackathon. There, using whatever resources we could, we were able to conceive the basic outline of our product in within the two days provided in the competition; however, our journey doesn't end there. We plan on continuing to improve upon this project to ensure our users get the best possible service and experience, and to expand our reach to help as many people as we can! You can find more about our plans on the "Future Aspirations" tab.

Creation:

The Healthical has an intuitive, innovative design with simple input graphics which is user-friendly. The model was constructed through the combination of multiple datasets from a variety of past studies including ones conducted by the American College of Cardiology, the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control, Harvard Medical University, and more. The weightage of each of the factors and the result each piece of information has on the result was determined by the data provided by these medical institutions. Once we constructed the model, we then transferred it into a language the computer would understand, Java. After coding the software on Java, we transferred it over to the backend of a website. On the website, the user, doctor’s office, or lab would input their specific information on the website fields provided and that would run our backend Java program, calculating the percentage chance of having a heart attack. Additionally, recommendations would be provided to help reduce this chance by comparing their data with CDC guidelines for the parameters like diet, exercise, etc.