NourishNet

Inspiration

We were inspired and motivated to make this project because of the countless people we hear and see that struggle to make ends meet and find nutritional and affordable food in the location that they live in. Many families also struggle with the fact that they live in a food desert which is an area that does not have a grocery store or market within a ten mile radius of said area. Obesity is also a big problem in the country with many people unfortunately having unhealthy diets due to food deserts and how food can potentially be unaffordable. These problems motivated us to assist the underprivileged and the general population to have access to nutritional food sources and fight many problems in our area and country.

What it does

NourishNet utilizes an Artificial Intelligence based chatbot to answer and questions the user may have related to nourishment, their diet, etc to ensure their path to a healthier life. Along with this, NourishNet also gives people the chance to build the perfect meal based on the ingredients they have. With the ingredients the user has, a meal that is rich in nutrition is recommended for the user which will also help them lead a healthier life. In addition, NourishNet also has a feature to locate food banks for people. We also implemented a barcode scanner to assist the user when adding ingredients into the website; that way, the user won't have to manually add all the ingredients to the list when wanting a recommended recipe. This will help combat many problems which includes assisting underprivileged people not being able to locate or afford food for themselves.

How we built it

NourishNet was built with the use of APIs, Python, and React. APIs were used to help identify what recipes can be made with the user's ingredients that they have; this API allowed NourishNet to help its users find the best meal for themselves. Python was used to make our own API to connect our Python and React program so that NourishNet will look visually appealing and all of our structures and methods are successful. React was used to make the website visually pleasing and add features such hovering-colored text and other attributes of that nature. All of these along with the use of CSS, HTML and others were used to make NourishNet function at the highest level for the user and look the best.

Challenges we ran into

While creating this we ran into many issues ranging from availability issues to inconsistent outputs, to struggling with finding food banks and filtering through them. Our team struggled greatly when working on NourishNet because of availability issues; our whole team struggled to meet all at once because of this, but we combatted this with people being delegated different tasks that were "due" at a certain time. This allowed our team members to finish what was needed even though we all couldn't meet at the same time. Another thing we struggled with when developing NourishNet was developing the "Finding Food Banks" feature; filtering and locating the food banks was something we struggled with because our Google Maps API gave priority to relevance showing us hotels rather than actual food banks. This is why we had to filter through to actually display food banks rather than hotels. This also led to very inconsistent outputs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Accomplishments we are proud of include being able to make the "Finding Food Banks" feature because of all the problems we were able to overcome when developing that. We are also proud that we were able to make NourishNet with the use of APIs and being able to make our own API to enhance the website.

What we learned

We learned a lot from this project such as how to use an API effectively and how to use our own API to bridge the React aspect of our code together to make NourishNet reach the highest of its limits. In addition, we learned how to implement additional React features such as when the mouse hovers over text, it gets bigger and gets highlighted in the colors of NourishNet. Aside from programming issues that we learned how to resolve and new techniques we learned, we also discovered how to effectively get our work done while not being able to formally meet together.

What's next for NourishNet

The next step for NourishNet is will be to make more features that will help people such as connecting them to others in their area who might be willing to donate. Another feature we would like to add is a diet planner to help people stay on track for a healthy life. We would also like to make the User Interface of our program better by learning more information about how to make the User Interface better and by using more React features such as the hovering-text attribute we learned how to implement.