Health Recommendation System¶

Welcome to the Health Recommendation System documentation! This system helps connect people with health and community services using AI-powered recommendations.

🌟 Overview¶

The Health Recommendation System is built with a modern microservices architecture:

Component	Technology	Purpose
Frontend	Next.js	User interface
Backend	FastAPI	API services
Vector Database	ChromaDB	Service data storage
AI Engine	OpenAI	Embeddings & recommendations

For API documentation, see the API Reference.

🚀 Getting started¶

Prerequisites¶

Make sure you have these tools installed:

Docker & Docker Compose (v20.10.0+)
Python (3.11+)
Node.js (18.0.0+)
Poetry (1.4.0+)

🔑 API keys setup¶

Create a .env.development file in the project root:

# Required Keys
OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_key
211_API_KEY=your_211_key
DATA_DIR=/path/to/data
COLLECTION_NAME=your_collection_name

# Optional Frontend Keys
MAPBOX_API_KEY=your_mapbox_key
NEXT_PUBLIC_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY=your_google_maps_key

🛠️ Installation¶

Clone and setup backend

# Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/VectorInstitute/health-rec.git
cd health-rec

# Create virtual environment
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

# Install dependencies
poetry install --with test,docs

Run pre-commit checks

pre-commit run --all-files

🏃‍♂️ Running the services¶

Backend only

docker compose --env-file .env.development -f docker-compose.dev.yml up

UI and Backend

docker compose --env-file .env.development --profile frontend -f docker-compose.dev.yml up

📥 Data setup¶

For a detailed description of the data schema used for the recommendation engine, see Data Schema.

Test data¶

If you want to test the system without real data, you can generate some dummy testing data:

python3 scripts/generate_test_data.py --output-dir <path_to_output_dir>

This would create a file <path_to_output_dir>/test_data/data-00.json with about 300 dummy services. You can follow the next step to load this data and embeddings to ChromaDB.

Download service data¶

If you are using the 211 API or Empower’s API, make sure you check with them to see if the API keys are configured correctly for the geography of interest. The scripts fetch data from the respective APIs and transforms them to be compatible with the Data Schema.

GTA data (211 API)

python3 scripts/download_211_data.py --api-key $YOUR_211_API_KEY --dataset on --is-gta --data-dir <path_to_data_dir>

Ontario-wide data (211 API)

python3 scripts/download_211_data.py --api-key $YOUR_211_API_KEY --dataset on --data-dir <path_to_data_dir>

Empower API data

python3 scripts/download_empower_data.py --api-key $YOUR_EMPOWER_API_KEY --data-dir <path_to_data_dir>

Upload data and embeddings¶

First we use an interactive container:

docker run -it --network health-rec_app-network -v <path_to_data_dir_with_json_files>:/data -v `pwd`:/workspace -w /workspace vectorinstitute/health-rec:backend-dev-latest bash

Then we can run the following commands to upload the data to the vector database:

python3 health_rec/manage_data.py create --name <collection_name>
OPENAI_API_KEY=$YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY python3 health_rec/manage_data.py load --name <collection_name> --data_dir /data --load_embeddings
python3 health_rec/manage_data.py list

Careful while loading embeddings, it uses the OpenAI API, and hence make sure the data you want to use is correct. Test with a small amount of data first.

Navigate to the UI on the browser¶

https://localhost:<frontend_port>

Note that the URL uses https, and hence in the browser you will get a warning about the insecure connection. You can ignore it and proceed.

In case, you wish to update frontend dependencies, run the following commands in the `ui` directory:¶

npm install <package_name>