Macromate

Your Campus Nutrition Companion for Smarter, Healthier Dining.

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The Problem

Current weight-tracking apps are incompatible with less mainstream and uncommon foods, which makes it difficult to estimate the nutritional value of foods eaten at Penn State. While nutritional information is available on each Penn State menu, it’s tedious to record each value and inaccurate to estimate using other resembling foods, often leading to failure in reaching dietary goals. Eating properly is a crucial component of anyone’s health and well-being, and therefore finding nutritious meals should be as streamlined as possible.

The Solution

Macromate is a personalized application that both tabulates and records a user's eating habits while providing optimized macronutrient feedback, enabling users to meet their specified dietary goals in an intuitive way. Our team scrapes data from all 5 of University Park’s dining halls on a regular basis, storing nutritional data in our SQLite database. While our team members have all faced the tedious nature of tracking macros, we were compelled to develop this technology after watching a friend bring a food scale to the dining halls for more accurate macros. Our accessible technology supports a wider range of people to easily control what they eat and how they eat.

Our Technology

For our backend, we implemented a web scraper using the BeautifulSoup Python library and used FastAPI to connect the scraped information and store it in a database. Our scraped information comes from the weekly dining hall menus given by Penn State. We used Streamlit to deploy a Web application and connected it with FastAPI, allowing for streamlined data querying and transferring from the backend to the frontend using SQLite and SQLAlchemy. There we implemented an OpenAI chatbot that, depending on your height, weight, goals, etc., generates a personalized daily meal plan. To promote scalability and accessibility, we also created an iOS application using Flutter that includes all the features implemented on the website onto the app.

Challenges and Solutions

This was our first hackathon experience, so we had to adapt to HackPSU’s fast-paced environment. One of the challenges was that most of our members had to quickly learn how to implement certain coding frameworks like FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, and Flutter. FWe got around this issue by having our more experienced team members help guide others through learning each of these frameworks. Furthermore, the nature of the penn state nutritional menus was not compatible with traditional scraping methods, so we were forced to overcome and improvise with a headless browser. Everyone was engaged and determined to learn these foreign concepts quickly because they understood the competitive nature of this contest, and so we mastered these frameworks swiftly. Another challenge that came up was the issue of integrating various aspects of our code into one seamlessly. Our experienced coders effectively delegated tasks based on each team member's expertise, such as front-end website or database development, to efficiently complete each sector of the project.

Achievements that we’re proud of

Our team is immensely proud of the application we developed within the 24-hour time constraint. We were able to finalize our product that is compatible with all Penn State dining halls and accounts for personal preferences such as allergies, dietary restrictions, unique individual macronutrient goals, etc. The results of our application function accurately and utilize an intuitive UI to support people of all needs.

What we learned

As an all-freshmen team completely new to hackathons, we had to overcome a lot and learn to build this final product. We first had to come up with solutions to scrape the data from the PSU website and extract this data. We learned about Fast API and utilized this tool to scrape the data using Python. We then created a website in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the landing page for the product. Finally, we wanted to try new technologies such as Streamlit so we designed the main web app using this technology.

Open-Source Technology Used

Streamlit, Flutter, Fast API, SQLite

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