BluView

Framing the Problem

Our mobile app aims to cater to people with less obstacles to food consumption. People with specific dietary restrictions (e.g. halal) and those with medical conditions who need to be mindful of what they eat (e.g. celiac disease, allergies) may find it more challenging to filter out foods that include ingredients they are aware that they should not be eating. Although people may know well what to avoid, it can be cumbersome to manually check the ingredients list on the products while browsing at supermarkets. In addition to this, they may forget what they are not allowed to eat, which can lead to wasting money as they leave the shop, may realise later on that their purchase includes ingredients they cannot consume.

Idea Explanation

Our proposed platform aims to collectively filter and track foods in UK supermarkets, informing people in real-time whether a product includes ingredients to avoid or if it is acceptable for consumption by allowing the user to scan the barcode of the item with their mobile device camera. The unique selling point of the app is it's features for the user to input their bespoke dietary restrictions and/or medical conditions, as well as other ingredients on top of those general options before proceeding to scan the item, with the option to create an account and store their data in an encrypted database to use the app for next time or use freely as a guest user. There will also be another feature which gives the user the option to whitelist items (display the items with the restricted ingredients) or to blacklist items (display the items excluding the restricted ingredients), which allows them to see if what they may already consume has those ingredients or to just view shop items without the ingredients. This will be different from other ingredient checker apps as we want to take care of the tedious checking on the user's behalf, and allow people to comfortably shop without the pressure of avoiding food they may be unsure about and may not remember to avoid at the top of their heads.

Challenges

As a team, we struggled with the overall format we needed to present our idea in, and eventually we learned how to create a pitch and demo presentation through legacy examples. The coding part was mostly difficult as we wanted features which required a database and the use of the mobile camera to detect barcodes, in addition to this, we also needed to connect the user interface coded in HTML and CSS to the Python code, which was where the functionality of the app was.

Accomplishments

We learned how to create a mobile app as beginners, learning how to code various features such as buttons and multiple screens for the app's features.

Next Steps

Our next steps for our app is to expand the item categories from food to skincare, as ingredients in skincare also fall under medical conditions, such as psoriasis and eczema. We also aim to refine the app by implementing accessibility features for blind, deaf and impaired people to use the app easily.