ThamuMnyulwa/buildathon-60min-2026

This was a fun 60-minute build for the Google Buildathon Southern Africa 2026 (part of build with ai). It was a short hour session to build something. Really enjoyed it. It is not production code, and it's just a fun little project in 60 minutes to get from PRD to Prod (dev really lol). # Sentinel Health Sentinel Health is an AI-powered field health companion for community health workers across Africa. In many rural communities, the first person to see a sick child is not a doctor, but a Community Health Volunteer working with limited tools, poor connectivity, and high-pressure decisions. A child with malaria, pneumonia, dehydration, or severe malnutrition can deteriorate in hours. Sentinel helps that volunteer capture symptoms by voice or form, flags danger signs immediately, and uses Gemini to support triage while keeping the human firmly in control. The same intake also becomes a public health signal. As cases sync from the field, district health officers can see live patterns, urgent referrals, and early outbreak alerts across wards. ## Buildathon Result Sentinel Health placed first in the buildathon. Buildathon room: ## Why This Matters Africa’s health systems are powered by frontline workers who carry enormous responsibility with limited infrastructure. Sentinel is designed around that reality: - Support the health worker at the edge. - Protect the child in front of them. - Help the district see the next outbreak before it spreads. This is not an attempt to replace CHVs, nurses, or clinicians. It is a safety and visibility layer that helps people make faster, better-informed decisions. ## What The Demo Shows - A modern React web app for CHV intake and district dashboards. - Voice-assisted intake: the CHV can use browser speech recognition or on-device Whisper transcription, then Gemini extracts structured fields for human review. - Form-based intake for low-connectivity or noisy environments. - Deterministic danger-sign rules that bypass AI and trigger urgent referral. - Gemini-assisted triage for non-critical cases. - Offline-style queueing and sync to reflect field realities. - A district dashboard showing case feed, urgent cases, and outbreak alerts. - BigQuery-backed health event storage for downstream analytics. - Two Clo …