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Med Mind, student-run AI startup, wins University of Nigeria’s hackathon with its medical chatbot

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At the hackathon, Med Mind created a user friendly-chatbot that offers treatment recommendations, drug-to-drug interaction, disease prediction, drug dosage optimization

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are the fastest-growing tech fields in the world today. This is no different in Nigeria where different AI startups are springing up with various artificial intelligence solutions. One such startup is Med Mind, an early-stage company located in Eastern Nigeria and founded by Nigerian students.

The AI startup was founded in 2023 by Ernest Akubueze, a Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence engineer who until recently was a student of Electrical Engineering at the University of Nigeria Nsukka.

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Speaking with Technext, Ernest says the goal of his startup is to bring up-to-date relevant health and medical information to people across Nigeria and Africa.

“We believe that access to Health and Medical information is very necessary and a need in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. Using AI solutions can really go a long way in bridging that gap,” Ernest said.

Ernest founded Med Mind with his co-founder, Samuel Onwuka, who is a Data Scientist and currently a 300-level student.

On Med Mind winning the UNN Hackathon 

In the end, Med Mind won the Bioprocess Engineering Machine Learning Interoperable Hackathon.

The hackathon was based on the field of Bioprocess Engineering. Participants were expected to build a solution in bioprocess Engineering using Machine Learning models. One of the major demands of the solutions was demonstrating the interoperability of models.

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Ernest said that after thorough brainstorming, his team decided to enter the contest through the health and medical sector since they are also in the field of Bioprocess Engineering. And because a lot of Nigerians, indeed Africans, lack access to health and medical information that would help them make informed decisions on their well-being, the team decided to go that route.

Med Mind created a user-friendly chatbot that offers treatment recommendations, drug-to-drug interaction, disease prediction, drug dosage optimization, and general prompt questions. 

“We implemented the model using Langchain as our Framework and we used OpenAi and Wolfram Alpha as Large Language models. We also used Wikipedia and DuckDuckGo for general prompt responses to give the bot accuracy in response,” Ernest explained.

The chatbot also boasts a chat history feature that helps users maintain conversations with the solution. On emerging winners at the hackathon, Ernest told Technext that it was a major springboard for the young startup as it looks to build on it to bring its product to market, grow its team and deliver excellent services.

“It feels really amazing to win this Hackathon especially because it’s our first. A lot of work was put into it and we got the result. It is a first of many and a stepping stone to much more we can achieve. This win is a positive boost for us, and we got really good feedback from participants, judges and witnesses. With that, we would go back to the drawing board, restrategize and come out stronger,” he said.

He said the team is working towards getting a functioning minimum viable product (MVP) that users can interact with. He hopes to develop the product with users’ feedback with the eventual aim of getting the product to the seed-raising phases.

Growth and funding plans

Currently, the Med Mind chatbot project is at the MVP stage. It already has a working model, and a basic User Interface (UI) to interact with. The team is looking to implement further features that would give it more robustness like access to real-live medical professionals in severe cases, hospital/Pharmacy/Clinic geolocation and several others as the project advances.

“Going forward, we’d like to get all the licences and permissions to launch this product for user consumption. We also want to get our unique brand and identity, our UI/UX and a team working on various aspects of the project. We look to bring this project to fruition for users across Africa and the rest of the world as soon as possible,” Ernest said.

The team, however, said it will need funding to actualise these plans. Thus, it is open to potential early-stage investors and venture capitalists as well as business mentors to help with the business aspect of the startup.

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