SmartBytes

Inspiration

We thought a lot about how dieting often has a negative stigma in regards to being restrictive, and we wanted a way for people to still enjoy their favorite places, while also being able to enjoy their food stress free without doing calculations.

What it does

Our site collects your age, gender, height, weight, activity levels, and dietary goals to calculate your ideal caloric and protein needs. It then suggests restaurants and menu choices that fit this caloric and protein range.

How we built it

We built our site in Visual Studio Code, using Typescript as our base language. We also used React components, HTML, and CSS to style the frontend of the site.

Challenges we ran into

As we created SmartBytes, we definitely encountered a few challenges. Our API’s pull data from different sources, and those pieces of data interact with each other in our code, so one of our struggles was controlling the flow of data from the different APIs. Regarding APIs, some APIs did not have useful or clean data, so we had to try several different APIs. We also struggled fully implementing our algorithms that calculated the target calories and protein compared to menu results of a selected restaurant. There were a lot of individual parts that worked together, and given such a short time frame to develop the site, it was challenging to efficiently code these algorithms.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud we were able to accomplish the majority of the project! We each worked a bunch with different API's, which was more than we've ever worked with. Our site has a lot of functionality we were able to accomplish, like the complex algorithms we utilized, which contributes to our feelings of accomplishment. Our algorithms were designed by hand with pure logic and research. After putting so much time into this algorithm, we are proud. We can also see where this site could go in the future, which is exciting.

What we learned

As we developed our project, we learned more about how to use API’s in our code, as this project had several API’s that all interacted with each other. We also learned to try to put our shoes into the consumer’s perspective. Doing so helped format our site in an easy-to-read way, as well as helped us create our site’s functionality in an easy-to-use way.

What's next for SmartBytes

We want to use gen AI to recommend swapping out items for optimal balance of enjoyment and wellness. We also want to be able to order food directly through SmartBytes from restaurant or from Doordash, Uber Eats, GrubHub, etc. Lastly, we want to be able to connect to other health apps such as MyFitnessPal and Apple Health to maximize personalization.