Conrad Challenge - Soteria

Back in high school, our principal encouraged a few friends and me to participate in the Conrad Challenge.

We decided to compete in the Health & Nutrition category. While researching problems we could tackle, we came across an interesting contradiction: enormous amounts of unused medicine were going to waste, while hospitals and communities elsewhere struggled to access the same medications.

We decided to explore whether we could do something about it.

Our idea was Soteria, a medicine-donation system that would connect unused medication with organizations that needed it.

The idea sounded simple enough, but the logistics quickly became complicated.

We designed a mobile application where people could register unused medication by scanning its barcode. Hospitals and organizations could specify what they needed, and the system would match available donations with demand.

Rather than expecting people to travel to donation centers, we wanted couriers to collect medication directly from donors. That led us into route optimization, pickup scheduling, and the surprisingly complicated problem of getting medicine from one place to another efficiently.

We built a mobile app prototype and developed the concept for the competition. Soteria eventually made the top 50 in the Health & Nutrition category.

Looking back, it was one of our first attempts at designing something much bigger than an application. We had to think about logistics, organizations, regulations, and whether our proposed system could actually work outside a presentation.