Inspiration
We were inspired to work on this project after hearing the dean's challenge for assisting the hard of hearing. Now, while this program does not do that, we did want to make some for those hard of sight. A member of our team says that his mom often struggles to read the ingredient listings due to her poor eye sight, but it's essential for her to do so due to her various allergies.
What it does
This is a mobile app in which the user can take pictures of the ingredients label on any food item they so please. The app will then parse through all the text and determine whether or not it would be safe for them to consume based on their chosen allergies.
How we built it
We used react native for the mobile portion of the app, and developed a backend in python with FastAPI. To perform the text parsing, we used the google cloud vision API, which has many wonderful features in the realm of computer vision and image detection. We were unable to host our backend publicly, so we made do with local hosting.
Challenges we ran into
For some reason, we had a heck of a time getting our front end to talk to our back end. This was a major time sink and it took us way to long to figure it out. It is believed there was an issue with our local host blocking the request, but we are not sure. Because of these issues, this project is unfortunately unfinished. Programming aside, our team had a hard time communicating with each other. As a reflection, I would say a lot of talking was done, but not a lot of listening. This is very upsetting to me as it's my first hackathon, but I'm trying to not let it get me down.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Although we did run into a bunch of problems, and I'm currently writing this is a very frustrated state at 4:30 AM, I still am glad of the progress we made. We had a great brainstorming session at the beginning of the hackathon, and we collaborated on some incredible ideas. If only there was time to do them all! I also liked how we put our heads together to discuss which technologies to use and which ones we were familiar with.
What we learned
We learned that it is really difficult to get a project off the ground in 36 hours. For a lot of the time that I was hear, I was very stressed (but also having fun with all the side things). If we were to do this again, I'm sure we would try to be a little more prepared with ideas, and also take it more seriously from the get go. We gained a better sense of team collaboration and problem solving over this grueling time, so that's always exciting.
What's next for Ingredient Checker
I would really like to continue working on this project if possible. Our team had a lot of great ideas that unfortunately got scrapped due to time, such as considerations for other dietary restrictions that aren't allergy related (kosher, veganism, etc.). Maybe we can continue to work on this since we're all from the same school and have classes together anyway.
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