EatRight

Inspiration

To help people live a healthier lifestyle, as a lot of people do not pay attention to the number of calories/nutrition facts of the foods that they eat.

What it does

Indexes a public government nutritional API to allow the user to break down what exactly their food contains, such as calorie count, saturated fat count, protein count, and more.

How we built it

Utilizing the Amazon Web Services Alexa skill set and the United States Department of Agriculture API, we learned how to implement Python scripts and json objects that interfaced with the Amazon Echo.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge for our group was using technology with no prior experience, leading to a large loss of time because of constant Google searches and self-learning. Another challenge that we faced was integrating the Amazon Echo with a relational database. We spent multiple hours trying to swap between different database hosts, such as Google Cloud and Amazon RDS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team was able to push through and accomplish what we set up to create. Although not every feature that was planned to be integrated was able to push to live, we ended up with a working product that met our plan. Our group also stayed up throughout the night and reached the point where we were ready to give up, but persevered through and kept working until we were able to reach a breakthrough. Very proud of our group for being able to stick together and establish a working product for our first hackathon.

What we learned

Our group learned a vast amount of data related to lambda, schema, lambda functions, and sample utterances. We are all very interested in working with a Amazon Echo in the future now that we have a good basic knowledge of how to create a working Alexa skill.

What's next for EatRight

Our next plan is to finally implement ideas that were not able to be added to our final product, such as food recommendations, logging calories, and giving percentages for carbs, protein, and fat.