Salud

Inspiration

The inspiration behind our project comes from a desire to seamlessly integrate technology with the everyday lives of users who are battling dietary diseases such as diabetes, hypoglycemia, and hypertension. We aimed to create an engaging and user-friendly mobile application using React Native, Django, MongoDB, and VSCode that caters to individuals seeking personalized health and dietary problems. The idea evolved after talking to the Vice President of Talent Management of Axxess, Anita Paxton, from recognizing the challenges people face in making informed choices about their well-being and nutrition. By combining a health quiz with a recipe discovery feature, our project empowers users to make conscious decisions about their lifestyles. Ultimately, our inspiration lies in providing easy-to-access recipes and healthier living through accessible, technology-driven solutions that cater to individual preferences and promote well-being.

What it does

Salud is a personal health companion that provides you with a list of recipes tailored to your health necessities based on the disease(s) you're battling as well as your food/cuisine preferences. It also streamlines the need for a care giver to handpick and order ingredients/food for patients. Instead, once a certain recipe/food item is picked by the user, it automatically adds all the necessary ingredients into an "instant-cart". Once the order the reviewed/altered and approved by the user, the order is placed and the necessary items are shipped directly to the user's home.

How we built it

Frontend: The application was built using VS Code and React Native to develop the user interface. React allowed us to make the user experience more interactive and dynamic. Backend: Using MongoDB, we built a database with three collections: diseases, cuisines, recipes. Under each collection, the dependencies are listed in terms of how the three collections are connected. Using a top-down integration design, under the disease collection are the cuisines to choose from. Under the cuisine collection are the recipes to choose from. We then accessed the database through Djangon (python) to process the user's input and provide the according information(recipes).

Challenges we ran into

As this was our team's first time using MongoDB and Django, we faced the challenge of connecting to the interfaces in terms of being able to accurately access the database. Furthermore, we had to learn how to take in user input through React and process it through Django.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Merging these three different platforms was a personal accomplishment for all of us.

What we learned

We equally divided the work in terms of which platforms each team member utilized. Coming together and teaching one another what we had learned was very insightful while learning how to connect one another's aspect of the project.

What's next for Salud

We will continue to expand our database of diseases and cuisines and recipes. Furthermore, we'd like to enter the field of wearable devices by create an apple watch application that provides the user with general diet reminders throughout their day based on their condition and biostatistics.