DukeGrub

Inspiration

Finding healthy, budget-friendly foods should not be hard. Over the past few years at Duke, however, our team members have found it extremely difficult to balance healthy eating and sustainable spending on food. Without a centralized platform, we were forced to constantly monitor our spending by looking up the recommended weekly balances provided by Duke. We also were not aware of many of the food options available on campus. Furthermore, nutritional information of available foods was not easily accessible, and there was no intuitive way to track one’s daily nutritional intake. This made it difficult to know the right meals to eat.

What it does

Our app tracks a student’s current food points and compares them to the semester target for that day. It also gives a 5-day history of food points spending habits. Additionally, a main feature of the app includes showing a student’s daily nutritional intake so far and recommending the next meal to meet the daily recommended nutrition values.

How we built it

We designed our front end user interface using Figma. Our back end was implemented in Java and consists of tracking food points, daily nutrition, and an algorithm for recommending the next meal.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenges came from learning how to connect the front end designing aspects of our project to the back end (the algorithms). Everyone on the team had little to no experience with product development, and all of our knowledge came from the Hackathon workshops throughout the day. We attempted to use XCode and Flutter to develop our front end at first, but we did not have the experience to effectively use these to build a functioning app. Then, we attempted to create a web app based on what we learned in the React workshop, but we also found that this program was a lot to learn in one night. Eventually, we decided to use the coding language we knew best (Java) to create the back end algorithm in conjunction with a program that would allow us to present our envisioned designs (Figma).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created an algorithm that factors in a preset nutrition plan, the nutrients already consumed that day, and the available food options on Duke’s campus to recommend a healthy meal that will help the student reach their desired nutrient intake for the day.

We also designed the user interface of the corresponding app in Figma, which we learned how to use during the Hackathon.

What we learned

Each member on our team attended a variety of workshops throughout the Hackathon and learned the basics of both front end and back end development. For the front end, we were introduced to XCode, React, HTML, and Javascript to create a web app and mobile app. While creating our back end, we reinforced our knowledge of designing and writing algorithms through Java. When designing our app, our team also learned Figma for designing the user interface of the mobile application. While developing our presentation, we implemented everything we learned during the workshop that taught us how to pitch an idea. We also learned about various ways to fund and start a business from the various panels and talks over the weekend. This inspired us to plan to potentially further expand our product idea in the future.

What's next for DukeGrub

We designed this app to specifically cater towards Duke students, as we have the most access to the dining options available at Duke and are also the most aware of the problems that come with budgeting Food Points. Nevertheless, our concept of meal suggestion within an allocated budget can be expanded to populations outside of Duke students. We envision that users could customize their nutrition plan (weight loss, bulking, etc.) and input the nutritional information and price of foods they regularly eat to more effectively and efficiently manage their eating and spending habits using our app. Furthermore, object recognition could be implemented in the future to allow users to take a picture of their meal and have its nutrients and price logged into a personalized health/budget tracker.

Built With

• figma
• intellij-idea
• java