SafeScan

Inspiration

Beauty products are used everyday by everyone, from shampoos and conditioners to perfumes and deodorants. But hundreds of brands of beauty products exist in the world, and it's hard to decide which ones are better than others. Many of the products could contain harmful ingredients that can cause various health issues, including irritation, allergic reactions, and even cancer. We've experienced this dilemma of choosing the safest beauty products on multiple occasions and decided to create an app to address this problem. With the help of SafeScan, we hope to aid everyone in choosing the right products and live a safer life.

What it does

SafeScan allows users to create an account and login in order to start scanning products. Upon signing in, users can browse our News page to check out various customized articles about beauty and health to inform them of new discoveries concerning health products and issues arising in the US. The user can then navigate to the Scanner and start testing the safety of their beauty products! All they need to do is upload a picture of the ingredients list of the beauty product they would like to test and SafeScan will do the rest! SafeScan will list out the severity of the risk for each ingredient, then display a final rating for the product that will either recommend or recommend against using the product.

How we built it

We built SafeScan on XCode using Swift. To create our News page, we used an API, and for our Scanner, we utilized TensorFlow to do OCR, converting the images to text.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into multiple challenges while coding our app, including issues with converting images to text and creating representative tables to display the ingredients of the beauty products and their associated risks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have minimal experience in machine learning and are proud that we were able to successfully utilize it to convert the images to text. We are also proud to have created a working app that can aid many people stay healthy when choosing beauty products!

What we learned

We learned many debugging skills throughout the making of SafeScan in order to keep the app from crashing and making sure that there were no errors present in our code.

What's next for SafeScan

We would love to make additions to SafeScan in the future, including a History page, which would display a user's past scans for them to review which beauty products they have encountered before and how safe it was rated. In addition we'd like to expand our ingredients list to identify a wider variety of ingredients, as some ingredients are added under different names and some rare ingredients are only used in certain products. We'd also love to create a page to display and recommend the user the most popular and healthiest products on the market in order to make shopping faster and safer!

Built With

• figma
• machine-learning
• news-api
• ocr
• swift
• tensorflow