FitCheck

Inspiration

All of our group members wanted to find new and unique ways to burn calories each day. We didn't know how many calories we had to burn, and how many calories we needed to consume throughout each day. These common questions prompted us to develop FitCheck, a web application to measure your calorie intake and recommendations on how to improve your daily health goals.

What it does

The FitCheck web application will measure your daily calorie intake and compare it to your recommended calorie intake amount, using your general personal data (sex, age, height, weight, etc). Finding the difference between your calorie intake and your recommended calorie intake, if this exists, we will suggest ways to burn the additional calories that were consumed, or ways to make up for a loss of calories consumed. These recommendations will have multiple suggestions to choose from, giving the user a variety of options.

How we built it

The FitCheck web application is a python-based application; we have used Visual Studio Code to develop our application. The backend development is written in Python, and the frontend development is written in HTML and CSS. We used Flask as our Web Framework to develop a usable website solution for our project. We also used two datasets for analyzing the input data. One dataset has a list of the calories for all food items and the other dataset has a list of all activities, and the amount of calories burned when completing the activity. These datasets were crucial to determine great recommendations for the user, depending on their input. The use of integrating front end and backend development and the use of Flask and a virtual environment was brand new to all of our group members, which made this challenge more intriguing.

Challenges we ran into

Routing our back-end information that was created via python to our website proved to be difficult. In order to do so we utilized a web framework called Flask that none of our group members had any experience in. Thus, performing the project simultaneously became a learning process. Next, seeing how to categorize and sort our user’s calorie intake based on the foods that they eat, we searched for API’s that would simplify this process. However, nothing that accommodated our needs were provided, thus resulting in us having to look into other fields such as databases and csv files.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although this was our first hackathon we were able to bring together what knowledge we had to manifest what we had imagined. That in itself is a huge accomplishment, but also the fact that we had gained exposure to such a valuable experience. This has helped us to gain an understanding of just how broad the programming spectrum and how its capable of all being interconnected.

What we learned

We learned the importance of diversifying our knowledge in programming. If you are aiming to reach an end goal, no matter how proficient you are in one language, the outcome that you desire will not be produced without the involvement in another language. In this case it was Python and HTML.

What's next for FitCheck

Fitcheck will continue to expand its influence throughout the internet by endorsing a healthy lifestyle amongst all Canadians. We aim to have FitCheck’s name be heard as not a logo, but rather a symbol of healthy living. We will continue to further develop our web app, expanding into several platforms such as Android and IOS. Also, increase our digital footprint by establishing our presence on various forms of social media to help spread the awareness behind healthy living.