NicheTea

Try tea and improve your health!

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What it does

NicheTea.net considers your specific health interests and matches you with the two teas: one common, one niche. Our website hopes to inspire people to try new tea and become healthier & happier in the process.

Inspiration

We are a team of tea enthusiasts. Sean likes green tea/oolong/black tea, Kelley is a matcha fan, and Ronan is always drinking herbal tea. Ronan recovered from Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF) and Lyme disease last year and has found herbal teas helpful for his immune system. His recent Reddit find of Cistus Incanus (Rock Rose) tea has been extra beneficial for him, and he hopes this website will enable others to find the ideal tea for their needs.

How we built it

We used Python, Flask, and PythonAnywhere.com to host and run the website. Data was stored in an Airtable database after the manual parsing of tea websites and was converted to CSV format. Graphic design was done using vectornator, and we used PubMed to collect relevant research for each tea type (along with various online articles). Additionally, we embedded Amazon links making it super easy to purchase the recommendations!

Challenges!

The substantial challenge of this project was aggregating the tea health benefits data. Since many of the compounds are understudied, there is not easily accessible data (so we had to develop our own). We manually interpreted a variety of online sources, and that is why our database continues to expand. While this makes the data processing time-consuming, it also ensures a certain level of quality to our data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are excited that we developed a web application that solves a problem we care about, and we hope you can try some exciting new teas!

What we learned

We learned a lot about tea in the process! But we also learned about deploying a live python web applications with PythonAnywhere. We took a chance on this project idea knowing the data collection would be a challenge, and we discovered a variety of tools (like Airtable and PubMed API Entrez) along the way. We're super happy with how it turned out, and we hope you find it useful!

What's next for NicheTea

There are over 3,000 known types of tea. Our data currently consists of 50 of the varieties we found interesting, but we plan to grow this list so that our matching algorithm can find you even more optimal recommendations. We hope to further develop our website so that people are empowered to optimize their health!

Disclaimer

We are not medical professionals, and this website is not intended to act in place of a medical professional. Talk to your doctor before trying any dietary supplements.

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