CalorieCounter

Inspiration

We were inspired by the Health and Well-Being theme for this year's HackKu and decided to try to improve people's well-being with our project. After a lot of brainstorming, we decided that the thing we could make to impact as many people as possible was a calorie counter program, as that is an integral part of one's health. We hoped that by making this process easier, it would allow more people to take control of their health and meet their personal goals, whatever they may be.

What it does

This script, at this point in development, tracks caloric intake and caloric burn by allowing the user to input data about the food they eat and the length of time they exercise, culminating in a graphical display of this data so the user can visualize their daily caloric balance, as well as track how this data changes over time.

How we built it

We built this script in MATLAB because we knew for this project we would mainly be manipulating data, which is something MATLAB is good at.

Challenges we ran into

We had initially wanted write an app that would track GPS data from a phone's GPS sensor and collect caloric burn information from how far the user walked each day, but upon further examination of MATLAB's capabilities, we decided that MATLAB either isn't able to do it in a way that could be programmed in 36 hours or can't do it at all. We had also wanted to make the caloric intake calculator operate by allowing the user to scan the barcode of the food item they were eating and pull nutrition information about that item from a barcode database using an API, but this proved to be much more difficult than we had initially thought, forcing us to shelve this feature for later development. A common challenge we found ourselves repeatedly facing was trying to design a script that was too ambitious. Our initial brainstorm page contained over ten features we wanted our app to include, and we ended up with a script that performs three of those tasks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first hackathon and we're proud of ourselves for creating something that we feel is worth submitting, even though it isn't as flashy as we'd hoped it would be. We're also proud of creating this script without the help of AI or other help sources - this is something we made on our own, learning everything we needed to know along the way. Tangential to this, we are also proud of ourselves for getting out of our comfort zone in MATLAB and trying to program functions that we've never tried to do before, such as communicating with an API.

What we learned

We learned that writing an effective and complete script is much more difficult than it seems, but we also learned that there is a lot more to coding than we had thought. Before this competition, none of us knew what an API was or what it stood for, or even the difference between a program and a script. We also went to a couple of the workshops and were really impressed with all the things that we saw that could be done through coding.

What's next for CalorieCounter

CalorieCounter will become a passion project for this team, updating and improving it in our spare time until it has all the functionalities we had originally hoped for. We hope to eventually learn how to get around Android Studio well enough to launch it as an app on the Google Play Store, meeting our initial goal of providing a resource for people to take control of their health and well-being.

Built With

• matlab