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FitterUpper

Facts Up Front Label Nutrient Analyzer

 

Member profile details

Membership level
2011-2012 Team
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Team Name
FitterUpper
Project Title
Facts Up Front Label Nutrient Analyzer
Design Challenge
In the U.S. today approximately 33% of adults and 17% of children are obese in addition to a growing trend of bad nutritional choices. Our objective was to develop a smartphone app which utilizes the information provided by the new Facts Up Front (FUF) nutrition labels to give users feedback on how much of their percentage daily nutrient requirements are met by a particular food. By quickly giving users detailed, personalized feedback on the nutritional content of a food product while still leaving the ultimate purchasing decision up to them, we can allow people to better interpret these FUF labels and make healthier eating choices for themselves and their families.
Design Summary
Team FitterUpper has built a functional app which can perform Optical Character Recognition on the different nutrients from a FUF label and compare the recorded amounts to the daily recommendations for specific user profiles.

A smartphone-based application was chosen in order to give consumers the quickest and easiest way to benefit from FUF labels at the point of purchase. To distinguish it from existing food product scanner apps, a direct interpretation of the label was chosen, rather than a scanner for barcodes or QR codes. By displaying percentage daily values for each nutrient based off of the information on the FUF label, the consumer would gain a better understanding of the nutritional content of particular foods. Additionally, this method allows the consumer to make the final decision on purchases, as opposed to having the app suggest certain foods, in keeping with FUF’s goal of helping people to make healthy food decisions rather than making those decisions for them.

In its current stage, users must manually crop labels to isolate the desired nutrients. Potential updates include automatic label recognition and cropping, storing previously scanned label information to generate a nutrient total, expansion to other FUF variants, and fact-checking of the listed nutrient amounts on packaging.
Sponsors
Thomas and Janice Baranowski
Department(s)
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Faculty Advisor 1 - Name
Gary Woods
Faculty Advisor 2 - Name
Stephan Schwanauer

Contact us

Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen
Rice University

6100 Main Street MS 390 | Houston, Texas | 77005

Phone: 713.348.OEDK

Email: oedk@rice.edu

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