FoodSnapperz

Take a picture of food to track it!
Keep track of your calories!
Avoid your allergies.
View statistics about your eating habits.

Inspiration

There are several popular calorie counting apps that currently exist, but most have an unsatisfactory UX when it comes to logging food items. A lot of manual input is usually required to track meals, and this can become tedious to do over a long period of time. Lately, there has been a large following for IIFYM diets which consider beyond just calorie intake to maintain weight loss/gain/maintenance. Macronutrients better take into account the different somatotypes and can make a substantial difference in health and diet.

What it does

FoodSnapper uses Google Cloud Vision API for image recognition of food items and matches the tagged food to an item in a database to retrieve nutrition information. The current database is of a small sample size that is simply for alpha version. Further development would refine ingredient breakdown of more complex meals. This app can also track your allergies and warn you if the food you want to eat is something you're allergic to!

How we built it

We learned react-native within the day with the desire to make this application cross-platform, such that it could be enjoyed by a wider audience. The base application accesses the phone's camera to take an image which is then serialized and sent to the Google Cloud Vision API. A JSON object is returned and then parsed to find labels within the database that match. From there, further details of the food item can be extracted and tracked within the app.

Challenges we ran into

React-native was probably not the best choice.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built something in react-native.

What we learned

React-native, the importance of peer programming, and to not do a project using languages that no one in your team has experience with. Also, don't use react-native because in your most dire time of need, NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO HELP YOU.

What's next for FoodSnapper

We wanted a simple way to keep track of diet and nutrition, with hopes of including extended features such as possible allergy triggers, and long term progress projection. We also want to extend our database for food and allergies, and maybe dabble in more machine learning.