Nourish

Inspiration

We were inspired by UC Berkley Blueprint and UW Blueprint to build tech for social good. We chose to focus on child obesity, which has nearly tripled in Canada in the last 30 years and affects at least 6.5 million children under the age of 11 in the USA. We were also inspired by the popularity of Farmville, Tamagotchi, and Nintendogs.

What it does

By scanning barcodes, users feed their virtual pet.
If they scan a barcode of food classified as unhealthy by the Canada Food Guide, the app tells them why that food is unhealthy and their character loses HP.
If they scan a barcode of food classified as healthy by the Canada Food Guide, their character gains HP.

How we built it

Mobile App: Swift
Back End: NodeJS
Data Sources: USDA Database /search & /V2 (nutritional info) endpoints

Challenges we ran into

There are a lot of different types of barcodes
Databases containing nutritional info are often incomplete and disjoint

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Barcode scanning is working!
We leveraged the 2019 Canada Food Guide to design our education pieces
We have cute characters and gamification elements

What we learned

Access to a strong set of food nutrition databases was critical to success
Bulk fruits and veggies don't actually have barcodes, but they do have a 4 digit PLU number