Nutry is a mobile app that does real-time tracking of health and nutrition from ingredients and nutritional facts labels on packaged foods.
The nutritional facts label (also known as the nutrition information panel) is a label required on most packaged foods in many countries, showing what nutrients (to limit and get enough of) are in the food. Labels are usually based on official nutritional rating systems. Nutrition facts labels are only one of many types of food labels required by regulation or applied by manufacturers. Others are ingredients list, health claims, calories count etc.
Knowing the actual health implication from these food labels or ingredients has been difficult. Also, many people with various health conditions need to know what to avoid (down to the smallest component of the food) when shopping at grocery stores.
Several mobile applications or websites have been developed to track health and nutrition but most of them do not vet ingredients in real-time. Some simply track calories, prices, etc. More so, these apps require a lot of human effort to operate. Nutry solves this problem by providing real-time vetting of food ingredients and nutritional facts on food labels. It does this using state of the art OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, with minimal human effort. All that is required is a smartphone with the capability to capture images; the application processes the captures food labels and returns with health data of the food constituents. That way, shoppers would be able to tell what items on the aisle to avoid while trying to shop for healthy foods.
The goal of this project is to help people manage their health easily and efficiently, based on what they eat, with the help of a smart phone.
Target Audience: People in the United States who watch what they eat, especially people who have one medical condition/food allergies or another and they need to be careful of what they consume.
This project work is limited to only packaged foods with nutritional facts labels (or food labels). We do not attempt to use the technology for items that do not carry food labels such as fresh greens or vegetables. However, it is hoped that users of the app would be able to track such items by manually logging them as they shop.
- Flavio Esposito, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Saint Louis University) for his Web Technology class.
- Open source communinty for the reusable code out there
- our class mates who have contributed to this project one way or another