Shopi | Devpost

Inspiration

In the UK, more than 2 million people are living with sight loss. Of these, around 340,000 are registered as blind or partially sighted. We wanted to make an app to help combat the loss of independence faced by people with visual impairments whilst doing day-to-day tasks such as grocery shopping.

What it does

Shopi is an accessible mobile app that:

Allows you to dictate your shopping list
Reads you the nearest supermarkets
Allows you to scan a shelf in the supermarket, and reads out the items on the shelf to help you find them
Helps you manage your food waste by keeping track of when items in your fridge will expire
Suggests recipes using items near their expiry date,
Allows you to donate excess items

How we built it

We used several existing API’s (Google Places API, Google Cloud Vision API) along with smartphone built-in accessibility features. We coded our app in javascript, using the React Native framework with expo. We also used python to experiment with creating a speech to text generator, and used Jupyter Notebook to help us learn about the API's, and get to grips with how they work.

Who did what?

Adhithi : Navigation

Scarlet: Image Recognition

Kia : Barcode Scanner + Nav Bar + Sustainability

Ishita: Sustainability + Navigation + Image Recognition

Challenges we ran into

Due to the fact that we were learning how to integrate API's, and use React Native with Expo from scratch entirely, we had some difficulty when trying to implement different features in our app, but by using many online tutorials and videos, asking mentors for help, and working together, we were able to overcome these challenges!

Accomplishments that we're proud of + What we learned

All technologies used were completely new to us, so we are proud of how quickly we were able to learn and use these technologies effectively to create a working application.

We learned to be able to quickly adapt to different technologies, and adapt what we were using to fit with React Native, as we wanted users to be able to access our app from both android and iOS.

We are very proud that we were able to implement image recognition, a barcode scanner, and GPS on our app.

What's next for Shopi

We want to increase awareness of it! We believe that Shopi could help many people with gaining a sense of independence, and in doing so, enhance the experience of grocery shopping for many people with sight loss.

Not only this, but we'd also like to expand to the general population as well; Shopi's sustainability features which allow the user to generate shopping lists, meal plans, and donate excess food all within the app.

Whilst we kept the UI relatively simple for now, given the our focus on combing accessibility features and sustainability, another plan for the near future is spend some time properly designing the user interface, to make the app more appealing to the general population.

These are features that would be useful to everyone, and we hope you will consider using Shopi!