CardiPan

Inspiration

In a world of fast, accessible, heart-clogging food, Americans have been afflicted with a cardiovascular epidemic. For Asian minorities, it may be extremely frustrating to be at high risk for heart disease but not have an easily accessible way to prepare the food they have at home cooked to suit their cultural taste preference. Even after a cardiac event, patients are discharged from the hospital with a diet sheet saying to limit sodium and saturated fats. However, as a person with a limited budget, just back from the hospital, these instructions still begs the question: what's for dinner?

What it does

This weekend, we begin building CardiPan, a website offering culturally relevant recipes for Asian patients. It factors in health determinants, medications, while keeping food personal, through a Tinder-inspired determining process. When you first enter the website, CardiPan asks about the user's daily sodium allowance, then allows the user to choose which ingredients they have at home from a given list. Using the ingredients, CardiPan generates a list of Asian recipes that the user can select or reject. Then, under the Recipes tab, the chosen dishes are featured with the sodium nutrition facts along with a step by step recipe to making the meal.

Challenges we ran into

During the project idea brainstorming/formation, it was hard to find a niche in recipe development that we had a personal investment in. Through researching the existing apps available online, we finally created an idea that was specific to cardiovascular health, Asian recipes, meal selection through interactive swiping, all based on the contents already in the fridge. When we vibe coded with Claude, the platform the AI generated did not completely fit the ideals we had set for our app. We had to proof-read and revisit the code to make sure our platform truly fit the design we had in mind.

What's next for CardiPan

In the future, we hope to implement computer vision software that is able to automatically identify the contents of the user's fridge or pantry given an image. Additional features such as a medication taking reminder, software that detects unsafe food and drug interactions, and a calendar that plans out heart-safe meals for the week could be included in subsequent versions of the website.