Inspiration

Every year, 140 million women give birth globally. According to UNICEF, a staggering 80% of them face significant nutritional challenges during their pregnancy. This isn't just a statistic; it represents millions of individual journeys filled with uncertainty, misinformation, and a lack of accessible, personalized guidance.

The internet is a sea of conflicting advice, and access to a personal nutritionist is a privilege few can afford. We were inspired by the need to bridge this gap. How could we use technology to empower every expecting mother with the confidence and knowledge of a personal nutrition expert, right in her pocket?

We envisioned a companion that wasn't just an app, but a trusted, agentic guide through one of life's most critical periods. That vision is Amana.

What It Does

Amana is a holistic, AI-powered mobile companion that provides pregnant women with personalized nutrition planning and guided support. It's designed to demystify pregnancy nutrition and make healthy choices simple, accessible, and intuitive.

Here are Amana's core features:

🤖 Live AI Video Call with a Nutritionist
Imagine having a nutritionist with you at the grocery store. With our live video feature, you can activate your camera, and Amana's friendly AI nutritionist appears on screen. She can see what you see, answer questions in real-time ("Is this brand of yogurt a good choice?"), and guide you toward the best options for you and your baby.
🛒 AR Grocery Shopping Guide
Navigating grocery store aisles can be overwhelming. Amana transforms your phone into a nutritional lens. Simply point your camera at a food item, and our Augmented Reality overlay instantly tells you if it's beneficial, safe to consume, or something to avoid based on your personalized profile. Warnings pop up immediately if a food conflicts with your dietary conditions.
💬 24/7 Live Chat Support
Have a late-night craving or a question about a common myth? Our AI-powered live chat is always available to provide instant, evidence-based answers. It cuts through the noise of online forums to give you reliable information when you need it most.
🥗 Personalized Diet Creation
Every pregnancy is unique. Amana allows you to create a personalized diet plan based on your stage of pregnancy, dietary preferences, and specific health conditions like gestational diabetes, anemia, or morning sickness. The app generates meal suggestions and grocery lists tailored specifically to your needs.

How We Built It

We built Amana on a foundation of modern, powerful technologies to create a seamless and intelligent user experience.

Swift & iOS: The core of our application is a native iOS app built with Swift. This ensures a fluid, responsive, and deeply integrated experience within the Apple ecosystem, taking full advantage of the device's hardware.
Apple ARKit: This is the magic behind our AR Grocery Shopping Guide. We leveraged ARKit's powerful object recognition and tracking capabilities. The app identifies food items through the camera in real-time, allowing us to overlay our nutritional data and safety warnings directly onto the user's view of the world.
Google's Gemini API: Gemini is the intelligent brain that powers Amana. We integrated the Gemini Pro and Gemini Pro Vision models for all our AI features:
- Live AI Nutritionist: We built a custom video system with gemini. This context is fed into a conversational model that generates the nutritionist's real-time, spoken guidance.
- Live Chat & Diet guide: Gemini's powerful language and reasoning capabilities are used to answer user queries with high accuracy and generate safe, personalized dietary plans based on complex user inputs.
- AR Data Analysis: When ARKit identifies a product, we pass that information to Gemini to perform a rapid nutritional analysis and cross-reference it with the user's specific health profile to generate the "safe" or "avoid" AR pop-up.

Challenges We Ran Into

Real-Time AR Object Recognition: Getting the AR model to reliably and instantly recognize thousands of different grocery items in various lighting conditions and from multiple angles was a significant challenge.
Ensuring AI Safety and Accuracy: Giving nutritional advice carries immense responsibility. We couldn't just use a generic LLM. Our biggest challenge was ensuring the AI's recommendations were always safe and medically sound.
Low-Latency AI Video Interaction: The live AI nutritionist feature required near-instantaneous processing. We had to heavily optimize our video streaming and API call pipeline to minimize latency between the user showing an item and the AI providing a spoken response.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

A Truly "Agentic" Companion: We didn’t just build a set of features; we created a cohesive and empathetic user experience.
First-of-its-Kind AR Grocery Experience: The "magic" moment of pointing your phone at a shelf and seeing it come to life with personalized advice.
Integrating Complex Tech into a Simple UI: We successfully hid the complexity of multiple AI models, real-time video processing, and ARKit behind an intuitive interface.
Tackling a Real-World Problem: The potential to positively impact the health of millions of mothers and their children is our greatest accomplishment.

What We Learned

Deepened expertise in integrating advanced AI models with native mobile frameworks.
Pushed the boundaries of ARKit on mobile devices.
Learned the critical importance of empathy-driven design for sensitive healthcare use cases.
Understood that deploying AI in healthcare requires a safety-first approach at every stage.

What's Next for Amana

Our vision is to make Amana the indispensable global companion for maternal health. Next steps include:

Postpartum & Lactation Support: Expanding to the "fourth trimester" and beyond.
Multilingual Support: Adding Spanish, Hindi, and Mandarin.
Integration with Wearables: Syncing with Apple HealthKit and other wearables for holistic recommendations.
Android Version: Bringing Amana to millions of Android users worldwide.
Partnerships: Exploring collaborations with OB-GYN clinics, doulas, and healthcare providers.