Faiza is a healthcare forum app that uses blockchain to convert posts into NFTs, which are traded on our marketplace.

Inspiration

Brought up in his rural hometown of Faizabad in India, one of our team members has seen several villagers unable to access modern medical advice. This often led to unfortunate catastrophes that could have been prevented easily. To answer the medical information needs of the lower-income section of society, we created a forum for health-related questions such as medications and diet. We hoped to leverage the decentralized power of blockchain technology to help bridge the gap between quality healthcare advice and the resources of the less fortunate.

What it does

Faiza provides a decentralized user experience for posting and answering important medical questions. Each question asked by a user will create a tradeable NFT that is stored on a decentralized database available on the Sonr ecosystem. The prices of these posts are determined by the “karma,” or the number of upvotes that it has. Higher popularity signals increased karma and a larger associated intrinsic value of the “post” NFT. Hence, we create a self-regulating token marketplace to openly trade the created NFTs. Additionally, we distribute the initial ownership between the post creator and the most upvoted comment to incentivize doctors to provide high-value, relevant information to patients.

Lastly, by using state-of-the-art natural language processing systems, we efficiently perform sentiment analysis on the posts and categorize them by certain tags. Additionally, we filter out relevant comments, deleting ones that are considered spam or derogatory.

How we built it

In order to establish a P2P NFT network, we employed Sonr.io, a decentralized network program. Our NFTs are stored on schemas that are pre-defined by us. The Sonr team was very helpful in helping us learn and implement their tech. In particular, we’d like to give a huge shout-out to Ian for helping us understand his speedway API, it really helped speed production :) To incorporate the NLP, we utilized Cohere to create robust and easily deployable models. We created multiple models such as one to classify the toxicity of comments and another to perform sentiment analysis on a post and categorize it.

Furthermore, we utilized Node for the implementation of the backend and Bootstrap React to build out an aesthetically pleasing front end. Moreover, to facilitate the multiple API calls between our servers, we used Heroku to host them in the cloud and Postman to validate them.

Challenges we ran into

To be honest, we weren’t completely familiar with web3 and blockchain. So, it took us a while to conceptually understand Sonr and the integration of its ecosystem. We have to once again thank Ian for the tremendous amount of support he has provided to us on this journey! Additionally, as we were making API calls between multiple servers (NLP, Node, Web3), they were often conflicting requests. Dealing with the sheer number of requests was difficult to handle and test using Postman.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud to officially be Web 3.0 Developers :) Prior to this hackathon, we had little to no experience working with web3 and blockchain technologies. However, this hackathon was a HUGE learning curve. While extremely difficult at first, we are proud to deploy a fully functional decentralized database, with the capability of storing tradeable NFTs and all the elements of a dApp.

What we learned

All of us have had a remarkable learning experience. While one of us became proficient in web3, the others learned about testing API calls using Postman, throttling speeds through developer tools, and deploying servers through Heroku CLI.

What's next for Faiza

Given the current functionality of Faiza, we hope to include all relevant features in the coming weeks. For instance, we haven’t been able to create a currency that can be liquidated into tangible assets. Additionally, we hope to implement credibility levels for the users providing medical advice to a post. Using sorting algorithms, we can determine the rank of the importance of comments while displaying them on the user interface. Lastly, we would love to simplify Faiza and deploy it in the native village of Faizabad, which was the initial fuel for the motivation of the project. We hope to see Faiza making a tangible difference at the grassroots level, changing lives one comment at a time.