Do You Recall?

Inspiration

We personally have experienced finding out food has been recalled late after we’ve already consumed them. For example, I have bought some frozen mangos, only to find out that they were being recalled for being contaminated with Hepatitis A after eating it throughout the week, and I only heard about it through a friend.

What it does

Users are able to upload grocery receipts to check whether there is an item that matches with the recall list in our database. From there, it will email/text the user depending on their preference.

How we built it

We worked on an Optical character recognition (OCR) API as well as a RSS to JSON API as our main streams of gathering data. From there, we stored the information on firebase to allow us to compare the UPCs in the future. If there is a match between the user's input through receipts and the database, it will notify the user through their preferred mode of communication. As well, the links to the full details about the recall would be sent to them so they would be redirected to the Government of Canada website.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into issues with API calls, since we are all not familiar with it and we were having issues with properly reading the data from the API calls. We also expected the RSS feed to have all entries, but we found out that it only shows the current month's recalls. This caused us to change our initial idea into creating a backlog of data that future users can check in the past. Also we were unable to complete the comparison, since the RSS feed does not pass the UPC code of the product into it. This was an obstacle we were unaware of until halfway through the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to link up API calls and saving it into our own firebase project for future reference. We are also proud of being able to mostly complete the initial goal of reading receipts and pulling from an RSS feed.

What we learned

We learned API calls We gained more experience with bootstrap and feeling more comfortable modifying the style

What's next for Do You Recall?

We were unable to match the UPC with the RSS feed, so we would like to explore APIs or other methods of being able to convert the UPC to the regular English or another medium to be compared to the RSS feed.

Built With

• bootstrap
• firebase
• firestore
• javascript
• ocr
• rss2json