Vita Geneome

Inspiration

If you watch what you eat you might be focused on just a few statistics such as how many calories does this drink have? Is this too much fat and carbs for an energy bar? Should I eat more protein? While all these questions are important, we often neglect which micronutrients are important to include in our diet. Micronutrients help prevent disease and fight off the signs of aging.

Vita Geneome can help!! She gives suggestions based on your genome on which nutrients to include in your diet so that you will not sleep with the fishes too soon.

What it does

Vita wants to make you an offer you should not refuse by giving you a personalized nutrition plan based on your genome. This plan can help you figure out which micronutrients are most important to feed your body. She also uses OCR to read nutrition labels to let you know what micronutrients are prevalent in an item. The purpose of Vita is to let you know when to leave the cannoli and take the blueberry bran muffin instead.

How I built it

Took the GenomeLink node starter app and made it material design. Facebook Messenger is used to allow easy access to this information. I then used the USDA Food Composition Databases API to help interpret food labels with the help of Amazon Rekognition to handle the OCR.

Challenges I ran into

I should have started earlier especially with the design of the bot. Early on I didn’t have a name or personality in mind so I named her Starter Bot. Since then I renamed her Vita Geneome but Facebook still hasn’t gotten around to approving the change. The GenomeLink API was super easy to implement.