Sophomore Computer Science student develops hospital locator app
Alim Darmenov reviewing The Hospital Locator with Dr. Junaid Zubairi (left) and Charles Cornell, certified business incubator manager at the Center for Innovation & Economic Development, where the hospital app was created.
The Hospital Locator, a new app designed for the iPhone that lets you locate the nearest hospital, has been developed by Alim Darmenov, a sophomore Computer Science major, under the supervision of SUNY Distinguished Professor Junaid Zubairi.
“This app will be very useful for a person who is traveling on the road and gets sick or gets into a situation due to which the traveler needs to go to a hospital. This app is not for real emergencies in which the traveler should call 911,” said Dr. Zubairi, who is a professor and chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences.
Mr. Darmenov, from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, worked on the app in CSIT 499: Senior Project.
Hospital Locator, developed for the iOS platform, will use Google Maps API to search for hospitals within a specified radius and then use as many factors as possible from an algorithm developed by Zubairi to rank them based on capacity, number of physicians and trauma facilities. The app will then present the three top ranked hospitals to the user and also include travel time, its hours of operation and contact information.
“What it does is sorts hospitals and other medical facilities and ranks them essentially on (type of facility), location and the time to get there,” Darmenov explained. “It’s something that I want to definitely add to,” he said.
Being exposed to the entire full-stack software development was the biggest benefit of working on the project, Darmenov explained. He had the opportunity to develop the user interface and all of the back-end code from the ground up.
“This was my first time working with an API, creating a user interface and developing an app. I am grateful for this experience because I know it will help me with software development in the future!” Darmenov said.
It’s not common for sophomores to enroll in CSIT 499, Zubairi acknowledged, but Darmenov has strong credentials. Zubairi recommended the senior course to Darmenov based on his strong academic performance, earning an A, in CSIT 311: Assembly Language and Computer Organization, taught by Zubairi in the fall semester.
“He is a very talented and intelligent student and he did very well in the 300-level course,” Zubairi said. “I offered him this project to work on and he finished it one month before the end of the (spring) semester,” he added. “The other professors in the department also speak highly of him.”
What prompted the idea to create a hospital locator app came from another research project Zubairi was working on that involved the ranking of hospitals within a network.
“Actually, I discussed with Alim that we should incorporate as many factors from my hospital ranking algorithm as possible but we are constrained by the amount of information available online via web search,” Zubairi noted.
Darmenov, who plans to become a software engineer, is currently working on another project through an internship with Zubairi’s company, ZubAir Data LLC, a software development company Zubairi founded at the Center for Innovation and Economic Development, formerly known as the former SUNY Fredonia Technology Incubator. He was also a member of the SUNY Fredonia programming team that placed 11th out of 20 teams at the 28th annual conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Northeast Region held in Albany, NY.
No decision has been made yet on how to release the app, Zubairi said. “We are working with SUNY Research Foundation to submit it as a new project,” he said.
