Halo

Eat safely, anywhere. Halo is your AI allergy assistant—scan menus, spot risks, and enjoy every meal worry-free. Personalized allergen detection for real menus, real confidence.

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Inspiration

One of our team members, Ethan, has dealt with many allergies (Severely allergic to all nuts, shellfish, and dairy). Throughout his life, he has gone to many restaurants where the allergen information on menus is simply inadequate, or where waiters don’t have the patience to deal with questions regarding allergies, leading to several life-threatening allergic reactions. Halo presents a simple solution to this problem: A website that allows users to upload food items for AI to detect possible allergens, preventing potentially life-threatening allergic reactions.

What it does

Halo is a project that aims to reduce worry when eating out, especially for people with severe allergies. The app is an AI-powered assistant that can scan menus and identify common allergens (from the FDA’s list of major allergens), displayed in a user-friendly color coded user interface. It is personalized to highlight items you are allergic to based on your own allergy list.

How we built it

  1. We started to draft out the different components of our project on Figma; We designed the layout for the dashboard, the login page, and the history tab.
  2. We created the frontend layout with React+Typescript styled with Tailwind CSS, and the backend using Flask for the API and PostgreSQL for the database.
  3. Afterwards, we worked together to connect the frontend components with the backend API endpoints to ensure connectivity and a reactive app.
  4. Lastly, we went back through the app and ensured that everything had a consistent design language and animations.

Challenges we ran into

Everyone on our team was new to Figma, so we spent a lot of time learning Figma’s perks and features to try and get a design we were proud of. This was one of the largest challenges, as we were trying to build an app targeted towards the UI/UX award. Fortunately, our team was able to dedicate several hours into learning the software, and eventually we were skilled enough to create a rough design of what we wanted our UI to look like.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is very proud of the work we were able to produce within the week, especially given our relative lack of experience with the technologies used in the project. For one of our team members, this was his first-ever full-stack project. We are all extremely impressed with the amount he was able to learn and contribute to the project. Additionally, our team as a whole was very impressed with the outcome of the frontend UI, as we were able to create a sleek, modern-looking, interactive frontend far better than what any of us have been able to achieve before.

What we learned

Overall, besides becoming more fluent in using languages such as Javascript and Python, as well as becoming more fluent in using frameworks such as ReactJS, Motion, and Flask, our team learned a lot of soft skills. More than anything, our team learned what it is like to contribute to a project with multiple members, including how to deal with slight problems such as merge conflicts, miscommunications, and differing schedules.

What's next for Halo

For the future of our Halo project, there is a goal of adding pages such as the Account page, which would allow the users to adjust and edit their account details as they please. Other tabs that are still under development are our Contact Us and About pages, which will be done to provide information to the user about our group and our purpose. In addition, it would be nice for users to get more information about each food, such as a short description of what each food is, and the ability to chat with an AI chatbot for clarification on allergens.

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