Bite Rite

Inspiration

We wanted to challenge ourselves in our first hackathon to sensibly meet a few different criteria, and definitely learn about how to implement and manipulate APIs. We particularly liked the idea of using a health API, and we felt nutrition that did not focus on simply calories or grams of fat is a particularly under-discussed topic. We decided to develop an app that would analyze ingredients as an approach to nutrition, rather than just typical numbers. There are many additives in food, and for many only the major harmful ones are well known. We wanted to make an easy way to uncover what might be hiding in people's favorite snacks in order to help them make better informed eating decisions.

What it does

Our app currently lets you input a UPC code, and then queries the NutritionIX API for ingredients. Based off of preferences you can adjust for taste or even food allergies, we made a simple algorithm that analyses ingredients in categories you select and gives your food a score, meant to depict roughly how nutritious, enjoyable, or even safe the food might be for you.

How we built it

We built the application in android studio. We used Java as our language, and as mentioned implemented the NutritionIX API. We used an MVC implementation to structure all of our classes.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of time was spent getting the API to work properly, roughly 12 hours. Once we did though, we had fun watching queries come back with the right data and building out the rest of the features like scoring and parsing that we had planned. We had to cut a few things due to time constraints, but are happy with what we got done.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Absolutely getting the API working. The algorithm could be developed further, but we like the idea of a simple representation of the quality of your food. I also think its neat that the app outputs why your score might be lower by tagging what it found during parsing.

What we learned

We learned a ton about setting up UIs in Android Studio, and about setting up connections to APIs. We'd like to think we had pretty good time management, but we learned a thing or two as well about managing our expectations.

What's next for Bite Rite

There is a ton we can do in the future. We would like to make the whole app a little more visually appealing. We also want to add the ability to add your own restrictions on diet. It would be neat to be able to scan in a UPC code, we found a Google API that lets you extract strings from images but did not have adequate time. The searching can even be expanded from UPCs to product names thanks to the NutritionIX APIs backend. We'd also like to further evaluate our scoring system and make it even more dynamic, and give it the opportunity to go up when good ingredients are detected.

Built With

• android-studio