The Bay Area is a diverse hub of languages and cultures, with more than 160 languages spoken in households. However, medical centers don’t have someone available to speak all of these languages, potentially leading to a lack of communication between patients and healthcare providers.
A Los Altos teen has created a solution to help bridge this gap.
Los Altos High School freshman Maahi Gupta recently developed a site called MediLink, which allows patients to fill out medical forms, schedule appointments, read doctor summaries, take screening tests and get medical advice about common ailments. It can translate seven languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hindi, Korean and Bengali.
If immediate assistance is required, users can press a button which would allow them to email their respective hospital for help or connect with an interpreter on Facetime, Gupta said.
Users can also ask the built-in AI chatbot questions, and it can respond with both text and audio. Gupta said she trained the audio feature using YouTube content produced in the respective languages so the chatbot could understand and replicate native accents.
“It was really fun asking it questions and seeing what its responses were,” Gupta said. “I was laughing the whole time because I was so amazed. Its responses were really helpful and it was mind blowing that it could do that.”
The idea for MediLink came from Gupta’s own experience. She had seen her family accompany her grandparents to the hospital many times because they did not speak English.
Gupta said she did not think much of it until she attended the San Mateo County API Foundation summer internship program, which aims to expose youth to public service and give them networking opportunities with city officials.
While speaking to community members during the program, Gupta said she realized the lack of medical translation was a bigger problem than she previously thought.
“I remember my grandparents always said, ‘What was the doctor saying?’” Gupta said. “I grew up around that, but through my internship, I realized this problem was overlooked. There’s so much diversity, but we still don’t have sufficient interpreters at hospitals.”
At the end of the internship, students had to present a proposal to the county, and Gupta’s group focused on the lack of resources for non-English speakers at local medical facilities, program director and co-founder Michelle Droz said.
While most groups delivered a presentation, Gupta was the only one who presented a live demo of the app she had developed, Droz said.
“What I loved about it is that it was a surprise,” Droz said. “Here she has this opportunity to showcase her app in a presentation full of local leaders. It was made for her, but it was obviously something she’s been working on for a very long time.”
After the program ended, Gupta said she wanted to continue developing the app. She contacted senior centers in Mountain View and is currently getting a HIPAA compliance certificate so patients’ personal information can be protected.
“(MediLink) will definitely be part of my high school experience,” Gupta said. “I’m going to try to expand this. This is one of my passions, and I definitely will create more projects to overcome
this issue.”
