Pusheats

Inspiration

Pusheen + Psychology + Nativescript = healthier living! Obesity is one of the leading causes of preventable death, and we wanted to help address this growing crisis.

What it does

We wrote an iOS/Android mobile application based on psychology/neuroscience lab research dialogues that have been demonstrated to help people to improve their eating habits. The application lets people record their meals, enter mealtimes to get helpful "nudges" from Pusheen, and rate their mood before and after meals so that people can better understand the impact that their food choices are having on their life. We also include random doses of XKCD comics related to food to encourage people to browse the app for fun!

How we built it

• "Used Heroku for Flask app deployment for backend"
• Scraped XKCD pictures and tagged captions with Monkeylearn's Machine Classifier APIs. Hand-tagged the categories that were relevant to healthy eating, and generated listing of all XKCDs suitable for healthy eating app
• Nativescript to develop mobile app
• Telerik platform to deploy app for prototyping

Challenges we ran into

• Working with mobile apps for the first time
• Getting Nativescript dependencies and iOS/Android emulators set up on various devices
• "No success with Microsoft OCR API for reading text from xkcd comics/images (#comicsansforcaptchas)"
• Losing a laptop for several hours due to Windows 10 auto-update

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Working with Nativescript and Flask for the first time
• Working together with a ML API to improve image tagging quality
• Deploying our first mobile app!

What we learned

• How to integrate different technologies to make a mobile app work

What's next for Pusheats

• Pitching the app to friends at the psych lab!

Built With

• css
• flask
• javascript
• monkeylearn
• nativescript