Inspiration
Many people have food allergies and the risks of eating any foods which they are unaware of and allergic to may cause symptoms ranging from vomiting and itching to cardiac arrest. Take the example of people allergic to peanuts, peanut is a very common ingredient in many products, sometimes if people who are allergic to peanuts consume foods that contain peanut/peanut oil, it sometimes causes anaphylaxis and epinephrine injections are the only answer. We thought it would helpful if Alexa knows which foods you can eat.
What it does
The user tells his medical condition to Alexa, once that is done he/she can simply ask things like 'Alexa , ask baymax can I eat shrimp pasta' and Alexa will give you an advice based on your medical conditions or dietary restrictions. Baymax is also available as a chatbot on web and twilio.
How we built it
The medical conditions are not limited to allergies, all simple medical conditions and symptoms like general cold and cough can be translated into exact diagnosis codes ICD by the categories endpoint in Intelligent Medical Objects' IPL API. Whenever a user tells Alexa about his medical condition, Alexa requests the IPL API for the exact ICD10 code. When a user asks if a particular food can be eaten, then Alexa requests the food API (Edamame) for the nutrition details and health labels associated with the food item. Once it has both the ICD10 code and the health labels for requested food item, it searches our firebase database for foods to avoid based on the ICD10 codes and responds to the user.
Challenges we ran into
This is our first time building with Alexa, and the data regarding which foods to avoid based on the ICD codes is not readily available, we had to look up some of the general ICD10 codes on the ICD website and populate the foods to the avoided list. Intents in Alexa are very short functions and are not allowed to make any API calls directly from within the function, it took us a lot of time to figure out how to achieve this.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is a very common problem, many people with different types of allergies, and tons of different types of food in the world and we are helping people eat the right ones among them.
What's next for baymax
When more and accurate data of what foods need to be avoided for different medical conditions and add a grain of AI/ML to our app and it can tell what foods you can and cannot eat with a much higher confidence and accuracy.
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