Rozzo

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  Inserting user allergies/dietary restrictions

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  Determining whether an uploaded ingredients list detects allergens

Inspiration

On a school trip we visited a small town in the province of Vercelli called Rozzo. One of our friends had a wheat based allergy and had a hard time finding food that she could eat from the only convenience store in the town. It was extremely difficult for her to identify wheat ingredients because all the ingredient lists were in a different language. We felt that there needed a way for people to easily know what they are eating, especially when there is such a huge list of ingredients and some people have many different allergies.

What it does

Rozzo allows users to make an account that saves thier allergies and then allows them to scan the ingredients of a packaged good. No matter what language the ingredients are in, if there are any ingredients that the user is allergic to then they will be informed. All the user needs to do is input their allergies and take a picture!

How we built it

We used the Google Vision and Translation API, Node.js, MongoDB, and HTML5 to create the Rozzo web app.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge that we had was making sure that our website ran smoothly without any errors that would cause danger to someone by failing to recognize an allergen. Apps that have these potentials to save lives, must not have bugs that could put someone in danger. This is the main reason we chose to use the Google API instead of training our own ML model. The Google Vision API gave us a level of reliability and maturity so we were able to overcome this issue. We also implemented many failsafes into our project such as manual checking of ingredients.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment is being able to solve a problem that will potentially help many people. It is less about what we did in the past 24 hours and moreso about how if we can do something like this in 24 hours, imagine how much we can revolutionize the world in just a year. We are proud of a single weekend being the jumpstart to help people for the best.

What we learned

We learned how to be a team. Before this we were very used to working on individual projects, and mostly focused on algorithmic computer science rather than project based. This opportunity pushed us out of our comfort zone, and got us working together as a team, as we helped eachother with our weaknesses. We also learned about the potential impact we have on society, even before we graduate!

What's next for Rozzo

We want to be able to help as many people as possible, which means we want to be able to help not only people with allergies, but also people with religious restrictions as well. By implementing Halal and Kosher diets through presets we are able to give a new usefulness to the technology that we've already builts. By abstracting our core technologies to further the lives of everyone is an invaluable thing to a hacker and programmer.

Built With

• express.js
• google-vision
• html5
• love
• node.js