Due to the structure of the US healthcare system, patients in appointments with medical specialists sometimes spend upwards of 70% of their time in visits digging through records. We'd like to make that time zero.
To address these challenges, we started VitalVault:
A non-profit project focused on building simple, accessible, and secure offline storage for medical documents. The goal of the project is to use powerful and efficient algorithms in natural language processing to ensure that people can spend more time getting care and the limited time of healthcare professionals isn't put to waste.
There is a good bit of engineering needed to make this vision come to fruition.
Most AI is built to leverage the scale enabled by giant datacenter clusters, but for AI to be a reliable and useful tool for everyday folk, it needs to be:
- Efficient enough to run on whatever people have
- Reliable under any circumstances
- Adaptive to meet evolving needs
Automated diagnosis or recommendations are beyond the scope of this project. The goal is to allow someone to quickly retrieve documents so they may present them to a medical professional for advice.
Everything vitalvault will ever need to run until the end of time will be included in the app upon download. Security patches will be handled through app store auto updates if desired. All AI models will come with weights in the application binary.
No data will ever be uploaded to or downloaded from the web by this application
Great care is taken to enable the accessibility of the design.
The AI models used are carefully chosen so that high-end phones can take advantage of fancy accelerators, but old-generation phones are still able to have a smooth experience.
Localization is a priority and all AI models will be multilingual.
We will try to have everything be as intuitive and visual as possible. Heavy use of iconography and cross-component highlighting will indicate what parts of the app are related. Minimal tutorial text will be provided.
Nobody will be required to pay to use the application. Further, nobody will be allowed to derive revenue from the platform. All maintainers will be doing so on a volunteer basis. Security maintainers can be paid via donations.
Copyright 2025 Thelonious Cooper