MealPic

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  Get nutritional values for food photographed, edit serving size, select meal to apply to.

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  Take a photo of new food or choose from existing album.

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  Add bio info to user profile.

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  After adding each item, review nutrition of past and current meals against total daily allowance. Click on middle icon for alt foods.

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  Review healthier alternatives.

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  Scroll through album for past foods to record.

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  Review daily stats.

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  Review weekly stats.

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  Connect with friends to chat about how you're getting healthier!

Learn nutritional facts about what you're eating and healthier alternatives with the snap of a photo.

Why MealPic

It goes without saying that knowledge is key, but what’s less obvious to many people is that what we put into our bodies has a direct correlation with our ability to fight illnesses. Most of us are either too lazy find the nutritional label of our foods, don’t have quick resources to retrieve these values (existing market applications are too cumbersome) or simply do not know how to eat healthy.

MealPic was created to help reduce and prevent disease through the promotion of food nutrition awareness and healthier eating habits in a fun, easy, and interactive way. With the click of a camera, users can pull up the nutritional label on what they’re eating, see how it compares to what they should be eating (based on their BMI and exercise level), and get suggested alternatives for healthier foods of similar types (if what they’re consuming isn’t so great).

How We Built It

Our application was built using Xamarin platform, integrating computer vision API from Microsoft Cognitive Services and Nutrionix (nutritional facts) API. We wrote formulas for calculating suggested individual daily intake values of calories, fat, carbohydrates, and protein (based on established nutritional science data); totals for each meal, day, and week; and how the former compares with the latter 3. Our UX/UI started in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Experience Design, as well as Xamarin Storyboard.

Our biggest challenges were integrating the image recognition API (recent technology that hasn’t entirely matured yet and has scarce information on how to work with it) and working in Xamarin (2 of our 3 developers were using it for the first time). Despite Xamarin’s challenge, our most experienced mobile developer believed it to be the best cross platform and good for incorporating computer vision in iOS.

We are proud that our application is first (or at least one of very few of its kind), given the newness of the image recognition technology, and our vision/ability to connect disparate worlds (using technology to inform health and wellness and hopefully one day change the way many people consume).

Challenges & Future Development

While we were overambitious and did not get to marry all the frontend visions with the backend infrastructure with the limited hackathon time, we walk away proud of what we’ve learned and accomplished—especially for a team of 4 first time hackathoners! Next time we would be more deliberate about defining an executable scope with the limited time so not to spread ourselves too thin and be able to deliver a more polished MVP.

MealPic’s next move is to enhance image recognition precision, better integrate data with calculations, and enable social platform within the application (to allow users to connect and discuss with their community about foods and nutrition). Our extended future goal is to link information on where to purchase meals or ingredients and how to make the foods suggested as the healthier alternatives, which also starts to inform the business revenue model for the application.

Built With

• computer-vision
• microsoft-cognitive-services
• nutritionix-api
• xamarin