Research and Telemedicine

During the second week, we had gained some information from the research we had done the previous week. We learnt that a pandemic is the widespread of a new disease and an influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus emerges and spreads around the world, and most people do not have immunity.

From our research, we learnt that the ‘greatest pandemic in history’ was the Spanish flu that occurred in 1918. Much of the high death rate is due to the overcrowding in military camps and urban environments, along with poor nutrition and sanitation, which suffered during wartime. With the growth of Singapore in terms of economy and healthcare, nutrition and sanitation have improved. Therefore, we are left with the problem of overcrowding to solve in order to prevent the further spread of the influenza virus.

The natural reaction of humans is to panic when something unknown to them is happening. Therefore, when this panic happens, most Singaporeans would try to rush to hospitals to get vaccines when a pandemic happens.

During this week, we have also gotten an email about a product that is similar to our solution for the challenge. Telemedicine allows its users to connect with Singapore-registered doctors instantly, allowing its users to skip the queue in clinics to see the doctor from home or anywhere, anytime. They even have the medicine delivered to the users. e-MCs are also issued when needed to the users.

Seeing that there was a product that sounded like our idea, it was a little discouraging to us. However, once we got to better know the application, we realised that it was different from our solution concept.

What we had in mind was to allow users to book a timing online with the nearest clinic or hospital nearby so that the users will not need to be at the medical facility physically and thus reduce the number of people in facility, in turn prevent overcrowding. Users are also given a queue number and an estimated time before they are called down to the facility.