KATHMANDU, June 29: If you are a medical student preparing for your exams, you know the pain of having to carry around bulky books or notebooks for revisions. Understanding this woe, a team of 12 enthusiastic medical students from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital have come up with Pocket Medbook, an app that contains briefly summarized information that helps you revise your lessons anywhere, anytime.
Pocket Medbook works offline and is free to download, but is only available for Android users as of now.
Students can access various notes and information listed under 13 different categories like Important Eponyms, Anatomy Mnemonics, Physiology, Pathology, Classification of Drugs, and Tumors, among others. Users also have the option to add and save their personal notes under eight different categories such as Important Diseases, Clinical Science, Mnemonics, and Personal Stuffs.
The developer of Pocket Medbook is Vivek Karn, who did most of the coding for the app. He also took help of 11 other friends, all from IOM. It took them a total of two months to complete making the app. “Bringing together all the information and writing the content took a major part of our time,” he informed.
The hassle of traveling in public vehicles
The app is said to be useful for the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), and similar exams for medical board.
The app has already been downloaded by about 5,000 users and has a rating of 4.9.
“We had to pay USD 25 for registering the app on Google Play. There are around 350 Nepali users now and couple of thousand users globally, mostly from US and India. We also consult our teachers to see if there’s any error,” Vivek shared.
Many users have given positive review to the app, most of them calling Pocket Medbook a must have for medical students. One of its users, Rohit Raman Banerji has commented:
“The matter is concise, brief and to the point. It includes all the important stuff that one needs at the tip of their fingers. Thanks for making our life easier.”
When asked why they don’t have an iOS version of the app, Vivek said, “The only reason why the app is only available for Android users is that none of us know iOS app development.”
He affirmed that they have plans to make the app available for iPhone users, too. “If the Android version does well, we won’t hesitate to hire someone to develop the iOS version,” he shared.
Vivek also runs entrancemate.com, a website for students preparing for medical examinations.
