WegAssistant

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  The extension settings page.

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  My free-to-go food for the week is bordered with green.

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  It helps me avoiding high-calorie food bordered with warning colors.

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  I can easily choose to activate or deactivate the service or switch to other users.

Inspiration

Many people want to control their calorie input for the purpose of losing weight and keep a healthy diet. We want to build a service helping people purchase food with intuitive calorie indicators on the Wegmans website.

What it does

WegAssistant chrome extension helps users purchase items within the range of calories set by themselves. WegAssistant highlights shopping items by adding borders with different colors according to calories data(acquired from the Wegmans API): A red border means the calories of food you purchase will exceed the calorie range you set if you buy this item; Green border means you can buy this item without worrying about adding it will exceed the range; Blue means this item is calorie-free; Orange one means you're about to exceed the upper limit line by purchasing this item. The color updates when user browsing and adding more items in the shopping cart, which brings convenience for users because they don't have to calculate by themselves and they can directly see what kind of food they can buy to not exceed the limit. Besides, every time we shopping with the WegAssistant chrome extension, recommended calorie-safe items are also provided based on their purchasing history & diet preferences, ensure we offer calorie-safe food. Of course, these items' calories are all calculated and designed to not exceed the calories limit set by users.

How I built it

Using JavaScript(Frontend) and Python(Backend). We also have a nice catch of Wegmans API, MongoDB Atlas, as well as Cloud Functions. Combined with these awesome languages & tools, we have a lot of fun playing with them and build our cool stuff incredibly fast. For the recommendation part, we combine Collaborative Filtering Algorithm and Random recommendation.

Challenges I ran into

This is the first time we develop a chrome extension and try a lot of new technologies. We do spend a lot of time mastering it. The first challenge we meet is to combine our 3rd party storage with the Wegmans website, we actually store the related data separately and built a set of extension-specific APIs. The second is that we hope to publish our API in google cloud which took us too much effort to figure out how to host our service, and backend storage. Last but not least, we have to finish a prototype in a limited time, which is definitely another big challenge.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We learned how to build a chrome extension very fast in order to give a relatively complete and attractive output. We separated our work by skills, we have people focus on front-end, back-end and we also used machine learning algorithms for product recommendation. The most important thing is that we build a service that helps a lot for people who need to control calorie input.

What I learned

Brainstorming, efficient collaboration, communication, active skills learning, and everything we list above :-)

What's next for WegAssistant

Provide more functions. Our ultimate goal is to create a calorie-consumption market, a lifestyle sharing community and help people building a healthy lifestyle.