Nutrition++

An app to keep track of food calories and nutrition you are taking just by using your camera (Web-app/Android/iOS)

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Inspiration

We usually forget to eat food properly and medications. So, we decided to make this app can where one can track of what he/she is eating when they have daily classes or work. Through this app, one can keep track of calories and also set goals for their diet. It also has animated bar graphs to show data properly.

What it does

An app to keep track of food calories and nutrition you are taking just by using your camera (Web-app/Android/iOS). This app also shows graphs of calories taken in the past days. Also, you can keep a history of what food you ate in the dashboard. This app is secure, means that you need to sign up in order to use it, which will keep data secure. Also, we are using SSL protocol.

One can also use this app to check what kind of food it is if he/she doesn't knows about it, maybe when he/she is travelling abroad, so they can check nutrition and calories data of food.

How we built it

We use Google Cloud Vision API to recognize food items in a picture and then retrieve nutrition information from Nutritionix API.

The native iOS app built using Swift, ARKit and CoreML libraries displays calories, a label on the object in 3D. The machine learning model is stored on the smartphone and the app recognizes and shows information about the recognized object in real time.

Our web dashboard uses PHP, MySQL, jQuery and BootStrap and allows users to log in, update profile, and view their daily and weekly calorie counts on a graph. It also allows them to upload pictures and add food items using images. The type of food and nutritional information is stored automatically using the vision and nutrition APIs. It also awards points based on a number of items added.

We also made a native Android app which makes it easier to upload pictures and add food to their daily intake. The data from their smartphone is synced with the web dashboard as well. The pictures can be shared on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter within the app. It shows their weekly eating habits, nutritional information, and calorie graphs as well.

Challenges we ran into

The nutrition information was hard to find and decide on similar types of food. We initially scraped data from google search results but then found an API from Nutritionix. We then had issues with the number of API calls allowed which was resolved by catching historical data on the device itself.

There was a lag in iOS app due to network speed and large size of the image uploaded to cloud. We tested multiple image compression algorithms and tried to find a balance between speed and accuracy of the results. We then implemented a machine learning model in iOS CoreML library which analyzes the images on the device itself works with great speed and reliability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to make this app because it can make life easy for many people by solving the purpose of health issues. They can properly track of calories just by using their cameras. We used Google Cloud Vision APIs properly to solve this problem and grabbed nutrition and calories data from Nutritionix APIs. Also, we are able to store calories data of users properly in the database, so that they can keep track of their history.

What we learned

We learned how to use Google Cloud Vision APIs and detect food and drinks using it (including many other things) and passing the food name to the Nutritionix APIs to grab all the nutrition and calories data.

What's next for Nutrition++

We would connect the iOS app to our web dashboard and allow users to add food in augmented reality while viewing the nutrition information.

Users would also be able to set daily and weekly targets which can be used to suggest food items and help them meet dietary and fitness goals. Also, we can make offer them custom diet goals.

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