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what

Do you seriously know what Glucuronolactone or Taurine is? (I did not make these ingredients up)

What Are You Eating (WAYE) is a resource for those who:

Are highly sensitive to certain ingredients
Travelers who require quick translation of foreign food products' ingredients
Or those who are generally cautious or curious of what they eat everyday

Barcodes aren't universal, but ingredient lists are. WAYE utilizes OCR to parse labels and combines this with the knowledge of large language models in order to provide information about the ingredients that make up food products. Alongside an easy-to-understand UI, anyone can pick up their phone, snap a picture, and be a little smarter about the snacks they eat everyday.

why

Processed foods are an inevitable part of modern life, and we believe that everyone should have accurate information regarding the foods that they eat. For those with allergies, scanning ingredients labels can be frustrating.

Our tool makes the process of determining these potential allergens simple with multiple language support so cautious users can sigh a breath of relief even on vacation. We hope WAYE helps people feel even a little bit more curious about what truly goes into their food products and become more mindful of their health.

dev

Technologies include: React Native / Expo, Express.js, Tesseract.js (OCR), as well as OpenAI's API (LLM).

challenges

We had a lot of fun bridging the gap between an old technology like OCR (The first OCR computer program was in 1976!) and the new, upcoming technology of LLMs and generative AIs.

It did not come without its hair pulling moments, however. OCR is pretty bad sometimes, so it tends to jumble up letters for unclear or blurry pictures. But, with the help of OpenAI's ChatGPT, LLMs are quite good at "guesstimating" what the words may mean in the context of "food ingredients." So, it takes educated guesses and forms a cohesive list with possible warnings and effects for the user's pleasure!

accomplishments

I'm not gonna lie, I don't think any of us thought we would even make it this far with a project!!

learned

Throughout the project, we found ourselves using technologies that we had little to no previous experience in. We had to be very resourceful in finding ways to solve not only our main task, which was to create a functioning and useful app, but also the various challenges we encountered while trying to navigate these unfamiliar technologies. We had to learn to strategize in regards to maintaining our vision while cutting out extraneous features.

What's next for WAYE - What Are You Eating?

Next, we hope to provide personalized experiences by implementing user authentication. By signing in, users can have their previous scans, and allergies noted in the database. That way, we can carefully look out for and highlight dietary restrictions specific to each user.

Check out our slide deck as well!