Recently, there has been an increase in pets. An unfortunate side effect of this trend is that veterinary clinics are becoming increasingly overwhelmed, as not all pet owners know how to take good care of their pets at home and whether or not a vet consultation is necessary. This leads to wasted time, or worse, undiagnosed diseases.

Together with a team of students from three international schools across Hong Kong, I am developing an app to tackle this social challenge.

Wireframe

Before beginning app development, I put together a wireframe in Figma to showcase the benefits of the app.

I used this to demonstrate and explain the technology to teammates and showcase what the app could look like before finishing development.

Mobile app development

I developed the PetAId app in Flutter. I started by creating the home and pet profile pages referring to the wireframe, and then used the flutter_form_builder package to build the diagnostic test form. The backend was developed in Python with FastAPI, which the Flutter app can query with JSON requests and responses.

I enjoyed working with Flutter and Dart, as it became clear that the language and toolchain has put a lot of thought into developer experience. Using VS Code with the Flutter extension, I got to use debugging tools, stateful hot reloading, linting and intelligent code actions throughout the development process.

Presenting at Hong Kong Goverment ITC Tech Fair

Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC) Tech Fair

Pitching our app to an interested user

Our tech fair booth

Recognition award ceremony