MY GUT FEELING

My Gut Feeling

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from personal experience. Several members of our team struggle with stomach sensitivity and bloating, but the idea originally came from my own chronic stomach issues. I had no clear understanding of what was causing my symptoms, and frequent doctor visits became normal for me. Every appointment started with the same question of “What have you been eating?” and almost every time, I couldn’t remember my full diet. When seeing a new doctor, my mind would go completely blank, making it difficult to provide accurate information. We realized that many people face the same problem, so we wanted to build something that helps both patients and doctors reach answers faster and more accurately.

What it does

My Gut Feeling is a food-tracking and symptom-logging tool designed to help users understand how their diet may be affecting their digestive health. It allows users to record meals and symptoms daily, and then analyzes the data to detect patterns or possible trigger foods. At the end the period recommended by the doctor, the system generates a clear and organized report that can be securely shared with the doctor of the user’s choice. This gives healthcare professionals a reliable, data-driven overview instead of relying on memory, making it easier to reach an accurate diagnosis and plan effective next steps for treatment.

How we built it

Frontend: React and TypeScript
Backend: SQL database to store all user information and Python and OpenAI for the report that's being sent to the user's doctor
Object detection: Python and a Machine Learning model from Hugging Face

Challenges we ran into

At the beginning, one of our biggest challenges was figuring out what direction we wanted to take. The AI and healthcare space is huge and growing really fast, so there were so many ideas that it became overwhelming. We struggled to narrow it down at first, but eventually we realized that the best projects come from real experiences. That’s when we decided to focus on a problem that affected us as a team, as well as millions of people around the world.

Another challenge we faced was that most of us didn’t have much experience with frontend development. We didn’t really know what tools, languages, or syntax we needed, so we had to spend a lot of time learning the basics from scratch. There was a ton of trial and error involved, from deciding what language to use, to figuring out how to design the layout, to making sure it was user-friendly.

We also had a hard time deciding how to make our solution unique. There are already many tracking tools out there, so we needed to figure out what would make ours stand out. To do that, we spent time exploring our scope, thinking about what features really matter, and focusing on how our idea could actually support both patients and doctors in a meaningful way.

Accomplishments

Getting our frontend to be functional after spending so much time on the design, only to let many design elements fall through at the end since we ended up having to prioritize functionality so we can present an MVP
Being able to turn a genuine problem into a realistic solution
Making a killer powerpoint presentation that we are hyped to present to the judges!

What we learned

Why project scope is important
Teamwork makes the dreamwork
Knowing how to research use cases for AI with relation to health issues

What's next for MY GUT FEELING

Implementing portion sizes into our food tracking system
Enhancing our project idea by implementing it as a mobile app as well
Using more custom LLMs like Deepseek to make project more feasible and personalized on a larger scale