Summary
The Nerdery and agency partner gotomedia teamed together to create an iPhone pill identification application for the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Gotomedia provided the creative while NLM provided us their drug database. We built the app in iOS and used SQLite to manage the pill database.
Background
Seeing an opportunity to help medical professionals, caretakers and others quickly identify loose pills, NLM and gotomedia collaborated together on an iPhone app aimed at resolving the problem. We worked directly with gotomedia, who handled design, and NLM’s Pillbox team who supplied their massive database of drug information.
Method
While development didn't throw many curveballs, our biggest challenge was adhering to government regulations on how the data was displayed and used. Despite the data containing redundancies and multiple naming and numbering conventions, we were able to convert over 10,000 pill records for use in the app. Other features we developed include a pill search by drug name, imprint, shape, color, size and scoring. To help approximate size, users can physically set the pill in question on their iphone and scale a silhouette to match. Once the pill has been identified, the app displays its active and inactive ingredients, drug label author and more.
Result
The National Library of Medicine was extremely pleased with the end product. We were pleased to present them with the application on time and within budget and it was an honor to work on a project that will help emergency responders and medical professionals save lives.
Everyone loves the app. It's beautiful, intuitive, smooth, and stable. This is a complex dataset and leveraging it in a meaningful way requires a lot of work on the backend, both in design and programming. You have exceeded our expectations.
Project Manager, National Library of Medicine
