SnackIt

Gameify and track your snacking to build better habits

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Inspiration

In our everyday lives, we are plagued with the decision in which we must choose what snack to have for that day. With SnackIt, we hope to make that all so much simpler and more fun! By Gamifying the logging process, we can make an important health factor easy to maintain and track!

What it does

SnackIt will gather nutritional data for any scanned barcode and populate the screen with information about the product. From there, you can decide if it's the right choice for you. From there, we keep track of your average "Health" score and compare it with your friends. By gamifying the process, we make food logging more enjoyable and easier to approach for all. By presenting the user with simple scores and an easy way to check if they've logged in today, and how they stack up against their friends, we believe our product can make a real difference in how people keep track of their food.

How we built it

To build the frontend, we used React-Native with expo to create a truly cross-platform application. We are able to use the tool on the web, as well as natively on our mobile devices. This makes our program as accessible as possible for users to quickly pick up and log with.

For the backend technologies, we used MongoDB atlas for database storage, Express to handle API communication, Node for the underlying project structure, and the Open Food Facts API for food information. Using these technologies gives us a consistent, easy-to-use, calorie/food-logging application for our users to use.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest problem with this project was the ability to scan barcodes, but with some tinkering with the codebase, we were able to get it working on all platforms.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

Being able to get cross-platform support is something that we are very happy with, and we truly think that with some refinement, this could make an impact in the healthcare community. We are also happy with the front-end design we were able to create in the time-limit, considering none of us have design backgrounds.

What we learned

Splitting tasks for everyone to work on evenly is not easy, and some more planning on how the tasks will be split during the dev process would be helpful in streamlining the overall experience throughout the hackathon.

What's next for SnackIt

In the future, a feature we would want to integrate is the ability to track non-barcoded items. This would allow our app to track all foods, and focus less on snacks and quick items from stores. This would encourage everyone to log all their food, gathering the most health insight.

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