Dawai Saathi: a medicine reminder my grandmother can use without typing or speaking

Preksha barjatya — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:59:07 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

Dawai Saathi ("medicine companion") is a medicine reminder for my grandmother. She takes several tablets a day, finds speaking difficult, and reads Hindi and Marwari rather than English.

Someone in the family photographs her prescription or types it in. A Gemma model running on the family's own computer reads it into a medicine list. A person always confirms that list before anything is saved. The app flags known risky pairs (for example aspirin with ibuprofen) as "ask the doctor or pharmacist", and it never gives dose advice.

Her screen is deliberately simple: one medicine at a time in large Hindi type, one green button, and a voice that reads the reminder aloud. She needs no typing and no speaking, only taps. The family gets a separate page with the history and warnings.

Demo

Video (47s, with sound): https://youtube.com/shorts/asac9HyuAN0?feature=share
Live app: https://dawai-saathi.onrender.com (free tier, the first load after a quiet spell takes about a minute; it uses a simple stand-in reader and the browser's Hindi voice, and nothing is stored permanently)

Code

Prekshabarjatya / dawai-saathi

How I Built It

Gemma (via Ollama) reads the prescription photo into structured JSON, with a fixed schema so the output can be validated. It only reads; it never advises.
Interaction check is a small fixed table, not the model. A language model should not decide what is medically safe. The table needs a pharmacist's review before real use.
Temporal runs each dose as a durable workflow: remind, wait for a tap, repeat up to 3 times, then record a missed dose and alert the family. Failed steps retry instead of losing a dose.
Voice: the Hindi reminder is spoken by the browser or, if a key is set, by ElevenLabs.
Render hosts the web app.
The interface is plain HTML and CSS with system Devanagari fonts, high contrast and dark mode, so it works on an old phone.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

A prescription is some of the most private data a family has. With an open-weight model running on the family's own computer, the photo never has to be sent to someone else's server. I can also change the prompt, the language and the safety rules, and swap models, without asking anyone. A closed API would have meant uploading my grandmother's medicines to a third party and hoping the terms never change.

Prize Categories

Best Use of Render (the app is deployed there).

DEV Community: Preksha barjatya