Ingredient Police is a mobile app for Android that uses Optical Character Recognition and Web Scraping to enable users to better understand the nutritional drawbacks of foods they eat. Built in Java, Ingredient Police provides intuitive usability and versatility to enable the user to get the most out of the app.
What makes this app so great and unique is that its universality. There exist apps already that utilize US FDA bar codes to deliver the harmful effects of foods. But, this has a weakness: International foods are not covered by this method. So, Ingredient Police takes a picture of the actual ingredient label and parses that to provide a better solution. Leveraging the Cloud Vision API by Google, Ingredient Police is able to decipher and provide feedback on the ingredients within the ingredient label, a much more powerful methodology.
The main goal of this app is to allow users to better understand the harmful effects embedded in the foods they eat without the constraint of requiring FDA-based barcodes. By using the actual ingredient label, Ingredient Police is able to bypass this constraint and provide more quality results.
- The user is able to utilize the OCR functionality within the app itself
- There is a search functionality embedded in the app, which allows the user to search for a food product if they don't have it on hand
- There is a history feature built into the app that provides the user with a historu of the foods they have scanned and searched.
- There is an intuitive tutorial and guide provided to the user to better understand the app