foodsense | Devpost

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Screenshot of bounding box used to identify ingredients

Inspiration

As we brainstormed areas we could work in for our project, we began to look for inconveniences in each of our lives that we could tackle. One of our teammates unfortunately has a lot of dietary restrictions due to allergies, and as we watched him finding organizers to check ingredients and straining to read the microscopic text on processed foods' packaging, we realized that this was an everyday issue that we could help to resolve, and that the issue is not limited to just our teammate. Thus, we sought to find a way to make his and others' lives easier and simplify the way they check for allergens.

What it does

Our project scans food items' ingredients lists and identifies allergens within the ingredients list to ensure that a given food item is safe for consumption, as well as putting the tool in a user-friendly web app.

How we built it

We divided responsibilities and made sure each of us was on the same page when completing our individual parts. Some of us worked on the backend, with initializing databases and creating the script to process camera inputs, and some of us worked on frontend development, striving to create an easy-to-navigate platform for people to use.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge we ran into was time management. As newer programmers to hackathons, the pace of the project development was a bit of a shock going into the work. Additionally, there were various incompatibilities between softwares that we ran into, causing a variety of setbacks that ultimately led to most of the issues with the final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the fact that the tool is functional. Even though the product is certainly far from what we wanted to end up with, we are happy that we were able to at least approach a state of completion.

What we learned

In the end, our project was a part of the grander learning experience each of us went through. The stress of completing all intended functionality and the difficulties of working under difficult, tiring conditions was a combination that challenged us all, and from those challenges we were able to learn strategies to mitigate such obstacles in the future.

What's next for foodsense

We hope to be able to finally complete the web app in the way we originally intended. A big regret was definitely that we were not able to execute our plan as we originally meant to, so future development is definitely in the future of the website.