CalorieCounter

Our App

Nutrition, especially for college students, is often neglected. At the very basic level, hitting one’s own caloric needs is vitally important to maintaining health. In opposition, the obesity rates, especially those of young adults in America continue to peak despite intervention from government associations and other non-profit organizations. Balancing these two issues with the fast-paced, stressful lifestyle that most college students lead, there is often little to no time to spare agonizing over inputting meals into an app to keep track of nutrition. Through this application, we created an AI based solution that both maximizes the ability to monitor nutrition, while minimizing the burden on the user to track their own nutrition. Utilizing the Google Cloud Vision API we were able to allow for a live camera to detect text on nutrition labels as an input, which was then translated to a number to track the nutritional value of food, and compared it to the total necessary amounts of nutrition. We initially planned to scan an image of a meal and return nutritional information upon recognizing the meal. However, we kept running into issues using the food recognition API we had found. Thus, we decided to scan the calories instead. In the 36 hours that we were given, we were not able to cover all the intricacies of the complete health model, but we do have plans to expand on our product in the future. Adding features that track vitamins, minerals, and even expanding upon our food recognition abilities so that our application can give meal recommendations based on dietary restrictions, and physical activity levels are all part of our next steps. Further into the future, we hope to be able to connect our recommendation software with local grocery stores in order to quickly place food orders based on the user’s dietary needs.