Nutrigang

Promoting personalized healthy eating habits for college students.

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Inspiration

As we were all sitting in the dining hall together, brainstorming ideas, we realized how different and inconsistent all of our diets were. Ever since college, everyone has free reign in picking what they want to eat, but how healthy is that for us? Seeing that having a balanced and healthy diet in college was difficult, we wish to alleviate that struggle for our peers.

What it does

Our app Nutrigang has three main features: Bibi, Cam, and Trax. Bibi is the app’s AI chatbot, designed to help users ask their nutritional questions or even gain advice/feedback on their meals. Cam is an AI visual camera that allows users to take a picture or upload a picture of their meal to gain all the nutritional information they need. Trax keeps track of the user’s nutritional intake, such as their caloric and sugar intakes, and can also alert the user of the days’ remaining macronutrients.

How we built it

The chatbot, Bibi, is built using wit.ai (owned by Meta) which parses messages using NLP to determine if the user is detailing a meal they had or the physical activity they did that day; or otherwise if they’re asking for advice on how much more nutrients they should be consuming. The AI camera was built using APIs Clarifai and Edamam, and coded using React.js. The tracking system was built in VSCode python, where it holds multiple functions that can be utilized by the other parts of the app to determine what is best for the user in terms of nutrient intake. We built our UI through Figma.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced was connecting the individual sections of our app through code. For example, in practice, the chatbot should be able to take information from the tracker, such as the user’s personalized calorie and carb intake, and it should also be able to add to the tracker, by using the meal log function. We struggled to find a way to connect the two features, especially considering each was in its own programming language. We also faced a problem trying to connect our code with our Figma UI, since there was not directly a way to run our code and test what we had through Figma.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing we all had to do in order for this app to become fully functional was create the UI, and so learning how to use Figma’s web based design application for the first time was an accomplishment that was super exciting.

What we learned

Besides the many different environments and tools we had to experiment with to come up with the best possible solutions to develop Nutrigang, we also learned what it means to work together as a team and to delegate tasks. Setting realistic but ambitious goals helped us get to the point where we are, even though it seemed difficult.

What's next for Nutrigang

One hope of ours is for Nutrigang to eventually become a fully fleshed out app that users can download and utilize with ease.

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