Will It Survive

Uploading our food (ex. grapes)
Uploading our pet (a dog), and getting the response.

Inspiration

Our own experiences and concerns with our pets drove us to develop this website so that we can use in our everyday lives. Many times we find ourselves with our pet waiting and waiting for the food that we are eating. At times, we don't know if it is safe for them to eat such food as we want to give in for our pet friend. This was our solution.

What it does

Put simply, our site tells the user whether the food they’re eating is safe for their pet, both via photo input. Our website is able to accurately identify the food, type of pet (whether it’s a cat or dog), and the breed of that cat/dog.

How we built it

For the back-end, we used Python to fetch dog breeds and perform object detection, utilizing the Nyckel and Google Vision APIs. We used a hardcoded JSON file listing foods that are unsafe for dogs, which allows us to compare the food in a user's photo against this list. For front-end, we used a combination of Javascript and CSS to put together the interface.

Challenges we ran into

For the back-end, it’s challenging to find suitable APIs and databases to use. For front-end development, a specific issue we ran into was the placement of the web-capture windows. We struggled to place them side-by-side on our webpage because they wouldn’t behave how they should when we tried to align them.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We’re proud of how we integrated a few different APIs into a cohesive program. Specifically, we combine the responses from different APIs together using JavaScript and Python. We’re also proud of how we were able to implement the web-capture camera feature for the user to upload a picture in real-time.

What we learned

We learned about different APIs specific to our needs, and then how to string together several APIs and pass information between them and the front-end. We also learned how to stitch different languages together like Javascript and Python.

What's next for Will It Survive

Hopefully we’ll include coverage for more pets, aside from just dogs and cats (like birds, ferrets, hamsters, fish, etc). We’d also hope to integrate a way for our website to break down the ingredients of the food that the user uploads, so that we can suggest any dog-friendly recipes for the user. Finally, a feature that was part of our initial planning but didn’t have the time to execute was to allow the user to add their pet’s height and weight, so that the meals suggested to the user would be specific to their pet’s needs.