NutriBiene

HackUPC 2018

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NutriBiene

The problem:

In our team, we are all students living in a shared student flat. So it means we have to take care of ourselves; no mommy who makes us dinner. We realised that we don't know how to cook, and much less to buy the ingredients and all the stuff to prepare a consistent and nutritive meal. The basic problem is that everytime we go to the supermarket to buy, we spend our money on uncombinable ingredients: we just buy things we like without thinking about the meals. It ends up being an expensive practice and yet not very healthy.

We also are the kind of people who cares about what we eat; we check the components of the food that we are taking to our mouth and we don't want anything harmful for our health. So we always wished a tool that, just by scanning the product's barcode it tells us a score based on the nutrients and components quality.

The solution:

So we aimed our project to a solution to this problem; we created NutriBiene, a really simple and user-friendly webapp. It starts with a register form, which will make you tell us your nutritional preferences such as your dislikes, specific diets, intolerances, allergies... Even how much time you want to spend cooking! Once your profile is setted up, NutriBiene will generate you a weekly meal based on your personal taste and restrictions. This will make you leave your monotone pasta & rice diet, and make you discover the wonderful and marvelous world of the elaborated cuccine :D .

It will also give you a grocery list for your week, so you don't have to buy useless ingredients which will end up being thrown to the trash and it may help you saving some money! We have a feature to implement in a near future where you will be able to set the weekly budget for food, so it will adjust your meals and grocery list to satisfy your pocket.

The last but not least feature, is the capability to scan a barcode and get all the information of the product in a few seconds and right on your hand. We simplified the nutritional information with an overall score: the BieneScore with a color code so you can visualize what is harming you, and a list of additives so you can check what all these E-XXX things really are.

Difficulties:

The first and maybe most frustraiting dificulty was to find a good idea. We had problems in our daily life we needed to solve, but some were too hard to solve in a weekend time or, with a little bit of searching we found solutions that already existed.

Finally we came up with NutriBiene. We know that there are some similar aplications, but none of them combines all the features we have in NutriBiene.

The future:

We are really excited with this idea, and we have a lot of features for the future of this app if it survives. Features such as setting some products you want to have ALWAYS at your home, so with just one click you can make and order and fet them infornt of your door. Or storing, using the barcode information, the expiration date so we can notify you when a product you have forgotten is about to expire; or even introduce it in a near-future meal so you eat and not even notice it was about to expire. Maybe collaborate with some local restaurants... And those are just a few!

What have we learned?

This weekend we decided to get first touch with some of noweadays leading technologies specially AWS, Python and APIs. We never worked with any of those technologies before, so we had to learn it all from scratch (actually we knew how to program in other languages, so it became easier). Eventhough, we faced a lot of problems we had to solve, using documentations and of course the mentors in particular for the AWS. We are really happy with the result, and we enjoyed every single minute we have invested on this project . What we are taking from this hackathon is a introduction to a set of technologies that will open wide range of possibilities.

Github: https://github.com/mauriciabad/NutriBiene

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