Ancient Chinese spent lots of effort on and became experienced in disease treatment and prevention. Their ideas and findings were recorded in text and passed down from generations to generations as part of the Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM) field. In particular, their findings of “herb drinks” (i.e. plant juice or herb tea) have been proven useful as diet suggestions to prevent diseases and maintain good health. This health care strategy has been further propagated thanks to the development of internet.
There are patterns guiding professionals to select those diet suggestions. For this project, I want to code those guidance, specifically the ones for guiding “herb drinks” selection for college students, into a program such that by inputting their health situation, a student anywhere on earth can decide which the “herb drinks” will be beneficial to their current body condition. This program will benefit college students not having access to TCM professionals due to being away from home or preoccupation with school work. Some of the students didn’t seek health care until they becomes very ill but “herb drinks” will help to prevent small discomfort being developed into serious illness.
Thus, I am going to collaborate with TCM professional to develop a standardized health management system for college student. The user interface standardize the description of health condition of user and the backend standardizes the organization of classical “herb drinks”. In most of the cases, the system will automatically maps the health condition with the appropriate “herb drinks” and output the suggestion in real time. If the mapping fails due to special corner cases, TCM professionals will be notified and provide suggestions manually.
Meanwhile, challenges and concerns come along with the excitement for bringing the changes to the society. There might be difficult bug for me to debug. There might be difficult technical issues for me to implement some difficult algorithms and the learning process might be slow. I have run into program set up problem at the very beginning of the project development. In addition, one challenge from the partnered organization is that, as any program development process, the requirement for the program from the partner organization might subject to update as time goes on. I have to maintain the flexibility of the program.