Introduction 
When we started to approach the problem of symptom management, many ideas crossed our minds. We looked at disease specific options and more general ideas, such as the one that we ended up producing. We wanted our project to make a concrete impact on the rare disease community. Originally we wanted to create something that helped a specific symptom such as memory loss or mobility issues. We also looked into specific diseases and disorders such as Misophonia. However, as we researched more about what that would entail we realised that creating a project based on a specific symptom of disease or disease in general would limit the reach and impact of the project. We also reasoned that creating something specific, especially something that helps with physical therapy or exposure therapy would be out of the scope of the hackathon. We then turned our attention to problem statement E, creating a platform that was able to help and facilitate engagement between communities of people living with rare diseases. At first we were skeptical about this problem statement, but as we looked into it more and more, we figured that creating a platform to aid in this would be very beneficial to the rare disease community. We felt that focusing on a platform to bring together and unite the community would allow for a greater impact on a global scale. From this we started brainstorming Alera, an all inclusive platform for symptom management, community, and research. We saw Alera’s mission along those three prongs and wanted to create a project that connected these three important aspects of the rare disease community. Creating a program that connects the three of these made sure that sure we would be able to make the biggest impact on the community.

Methods and Goals 
Alera is a comprehensive web application developed to provide crucial support for individuals living with rare diseases. Our primary goal is to offer a user-friendly platform that empowers patients to effectively manage their health and well-being. One of the central features of Alera is symptom tracking, designed to simplify the process of monitoring various symptoms associated with rare diseases. This enables users to track their health over time, making it easier for both them and their healthcare providers to identify trends and make informed decisions about treatment and care. Along with symptom tracking, Alera also offers tools for emotional regulation such as journaling to help users manage the mental health challenges that often accompany rare diseases. These tools focus on providing support for emotional well-being, offering resources that assist users in coping with the mental strain of living with a chronic condition.

Additionally, Alera includes medication reminders, which notify users of medication schedules and dosages, ensuring they stay on track with their prescribed treatments. In response to a key challenge identified in the literature — the lack of professional knowledge and the difficulty in accessing essential healthcare services — Alera provides easy-to-use features to connect patients with the medical professionals they need. Our Specialty Doctor Finder feature helps users quickly locate doctors who specialize in their specific rare disease, improving access to expertise and treatment options. To ensure better patient-doctor matching, Alera utilizes doctor2vec, an AI-driven model that helps match patients with the right doctors based on their disease profile and medical needs. This improves the likelihood of finding the right specialist for each patient. Furthermore, Alera integrates a Clinical Trial Finder powered by TrialGPT, which matches patients with relevant clinical trials, offering new opportunities for cutting-edge treatments and research participation. 

Understanding the emotional and social challenges faced by patients and their families, Alera includes a community-building component designed to alleviate feelings of isolation. The platform offers a global chat feature where users can search for their rare disease, join a community thread, and interact with others who share similar experiences. Doctors who specialize in the disease are also able to join these threads, fostering a collaborative environment where users can seek advice and share insights. In addition to this, a separate family and friend chat feature allows users to provide health updates to loved ones, helping to keep them informed and involved in the patient’s care journey. 

To ensure secure and efficient data management, all symptom tracking data is stored in a MongoDB database. The web application is built using Next.js, React, HTML, and Tailwind CSS for a responsive and intuitive user experience. For the front end, we’ve integrated MUI for component design and Charts.js to visualize health data in an easily understandable format. Every page of the application was meticulously designed using Figma, ensuring an intuitive and visually appealing interface. With these features, Alera aims to provide a holistic solution that supports users in managing their health, connects them to critical resources, and fosters a sense of community, ultimately improving their quality of life. 

Challenges, Results and the Future 
Tackling a project like this meant that we needed to create a website that served different purposes while also not compromising on usability. We wanted to create a website that not only worked but also looked nice. Working with Next.js both of us had little experience with the technology. While both of us had previous web development experience, we had never used Next but realized that it would be the best as it made backend and frontend development easy. This was an issue for us as we spent the majority of the first day understanding and reading documentation for Next. This slowed us down considerably and caused us to not be able to fully complete the project. However, we both feel that this was an amazing learning experience and were thankful that we chose this technology despite the many hurdles that this decision caused. Since both of us had web development experience, understanding how we wanted the website structured and we feel that this helps us work through the difficulty as well allowing us to pick up and learn this technology. At the end, we created our own data meaning that the website was not completely functional as we were very rushed to do so. However, we were still able to explore and show some data on the website. The resulting website shows a dashboard of some symptoms that people with rare disease may experience. We also were able to display medication information and information regarding groups and communities that were created. While the resulting website was sparse and not complete, we feel that this prototype is just the beginning for this project. The current state, we feel, provides a proof of concept for the final website, even though it is still incomplete. In the future, we want to completely overhaul the design and make sure that we fully implement the group features. While we got the posts to list, we still have not created the function to create new posts or comments. We also want to flesh out the map feature and the trial finder feature as well by creating a server API that we can use to get the results from TrialGPT. We think that collecting the symptom data and then using OpenAI to put it in a format that TrialGPT understands will also be useful. We also want to create an onboarding for doctors so that they and patients can reach out to each other to create a more cohesive community, which we feel is important in finding the cures to many rare diseases. We feel that if we were able to work on this project more, we would be able to find more people with rare diseases so that more doctors and researchers can start research and benefit the community more. This idea we feel has the potential to help reduce the space between people with rare disease allowing for better research outcomes by finding more clinical patients. We also feel that this will allow people to overall have a better quality of life as well as find support in numbers is something that can help people feel better about their current condition. We want to use the website to also serve as a base for advocacy down the line and create a model along with the website to help people who think that they have a rare disease get diagnosed earlier.