Foody

Barcode scanning app for quick nutritional information, with translation and text-to-speech features for wider accessibility. Supports the food pharmacy program.

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Inspiration

We noticed the rise in obesity and the lack of healthy foods in impoverished/low income areas. We also noticed the Children's National Hospital's new food pharmacy pilot program. We wanted to provide a way to make nutrition facts available to all even if they aren't fluent in english or visually impaired. We wanted to implement an easy way to check if foods are healthy using the nutriscore scale and if the food pharmacy could take the food.

What it does

The web application we created takes barcodes two ways, either scanned with a phone/laptop camera or manually entered if a camera either isn't available or not clear enough for our application to recognize it. It then calls the Open Food Facts API to gather all the nutritional data and display it on a table with an image of the product. There then is an option to either translate, read it out loud, or do both. If the food is deemed to be worthy of the food pharmacy then there is a button that then redirects to the food pharmacy website.

How we built it

We built this website from the ground up with html, css, and a limited knowledge of javascript. We used html5-qrcode to scan the barcode and the Open Food Facts API to gather the nutritional data. We used google translate to translate the page and Speech Synthesis to read out the words.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges due to our limited knowledge of javascript and our poor choice of tools. For example, the barcode scanner we selected for our project doesn't work very well unless the image of the barcode is almost perfect. We also had a lot of trouble with the read out function since we couldn't get it to work with the translation function.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud that we created a solid, working, modern web app that has applications to solve real world problems as a sophomore duo from Oakton High School. We're also proud that we overcame challenges and refused to give up despite the fact that we had very little knowledge of javascript.

What we learned

Both of us learned a tremendous amount about javascript and calling API's as well as overcoming challenges as a team.

What's next for Foody

We hope to add more information to our nutrition page as well as make our text to speech function more humanoid. We also plan to integrate a new barcode scanning app to make scanning smoother and faster.

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