Nutri-Helper

Inspiration

I was inspired by a small project I completed in health class last marking period. The assignment was to list what food you had eaten that day, and what the nutrition facts of said food were. This project got me thinking about how the contents of my food affected my health and have led to me being more conscious of what I eat. For this reason, I decided to work on a program that would assist in the field of nutrition and fitness, so that other people could become more conscious of their dietary choices.

What it does

This program catalogs the nutrition information of the food the user eats and can help them make choices to improve their nutrition and overall health. It uses FDA recommendations to provide the user with information on what nutrients they should be consuming, helping them improve and vary their diet.

How I built it

This program was built in the IDE Replit with the programming language Python.

Challenges I ran into

This project was difficult because of the time constraint. Programming in Python, while time-efficient compared to other languages, remains a time-consuming activity. Due to this, I had to work quickly in order to meet the deadline. Through caffeine and determination, I was able to finish most of the project in time.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The element of this project I am most proud of is the user data save system. I was able to learn to encrypt strings using python's cryptography library and thus could utilize a method of storing user data across program resets. By saving the value of every variable in the program in a single string, then encrypting the string, I could send that encrypted string to the user, who could use it to gain access to their account again later by reinputting it. When the program receives the user's key, it decrypts it and reassigns all of the variables based on the decrypted string. This system was very difficult to design and implement but turned out well.

What I learned

Throughout this hackathon, I learned the importance of research in development, as information gained through the analysis of trustworthy sources on the internet proved to be a key factor in creating the program.

What's next for Nutri-Helper

In the future, I would hope to implement a feature that let the user take a picture of the nutrition label of their food and upload that to make the process of inputting the nutrition facts less tedious. This would be very feasible because the nutrition labels of most foods are very consistent, and thus image recognition could be performed on the labels quite easily. I would also like to improve the program visually, as currently it only exists as text. This could be done in website or app form.

Built With

• python
• replit