Snack Scan

Inspiration

One of our team members has a niece who was recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. One of her biggest troubles has been finding low carb snacks that would not require her to take insulin. Reading nutrition labels and understanding what they mean for her blood sugar levels has been a steep learning curve for the family and for millions of others around the globe. Witnessing how friends and family confronted these challenges firsthand served as our team’s inspiration for creating Snack Scan.

What it does

SnackSCan is an app designed to help diabetes patients scan individual food and drink items to generate a nutritional summary. The data gathered from the app will help users make educated decisions on snacks to include in their diets.

How we built it

With regard to our project’s specs, the app was programmed in XCode using Swift and Objective-C. We utilized Nutritionix for the Nutrition API, VisionKit for barcode scanning functionality, and Firebase for user authentication. We drew heavily from the MVC design pattern to organize our project and files.

Challenges we ran into

Our team experienced several challenges during our app development. We frequently encountered conflicts in workflow management and source control as other members pulled and pushed changes that inadvertently disrupted the code. The free Nutritionix demo restricted the number of times we could scan a barcode before running out of free uses, so we were forced to create multiple accounts. Lastly, due to the strict time constraints, our group experienced difficulty picking and choosing which features to focus on and which to discard.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team of mostly hackathon first-timers, we are all proud of our final product, SnackSCan. Earlier on the hackathon, we agreed on developing an app for monitoring diabetic diets. As we executed our plan, we found other ideas that we wanted to implement into our app, and through a gargantuan effort from all members, the app easily surpassed our initial expectations!

What we learned

Building the project motivated us to improve our proficiency in utilizing tools useful for mobile app development, such as APIs and other necessary programming languages. For instance, we learned about Firebase Authentication in order to set up the login and account creation system. Since most of our team members have never actively participated in mobile app development, our team gained a basic understanding of Xcode and SwiftUI as we continued to explore their functions.

What's next for Snack Scan

SnackSCan’s future involves implementing additional social features to allow users to share and recommend diabetes-friendly snacks and recipes, help users track nutritional data over time by offering trend analysis/statistics, and generate individualized food recommendations based on dietary needs. Given more time, we would also like to further improve the app’s user interface.

Built With

• firebase
• googleauth
• nutritionix
• objective-c
• swift
• visionkit
• xcode