# We'd love if you read through this in its entirety, but we suggest reading "What it does" if you're limited on time

## The Boring Stuff (Intro)

* Christina Zhao - 1st-time hacker - aka "Is cucumber a fruit"
* Peng Lu - 2nd-time hacker - aka "Why is this not working!!" x 30
* Matthew Yang - ML specialist - aka "What is an API"

## What it does

It's a cross-platform app that can promote mental health and healthier eating habits!

* Log when you eat healthy food.
* Feed your "munch buddies" and level them up!
* Learn about the different types of nutrients, what they do, and which foods contain them.

Since we are not very experienced at full-stack development, we just wanted to have fun and learn some new things. However, we feel that our project idea really ended up being a perfect fit for a few challenges, including the Otsuka Valuenex challenge!

Specifically,

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> Many of us underestimate how important eating and mental health are to our overall wellness.
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That's why we we made this app! After doing some research on the compounding relationship between eating, mental health, and wellness, we were quite shocked by the overwhelming amount of evidence and studies detailing the negative consequences..

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> We will be judging for the best **mental wellness solution** that incorporates **food in a digital manner.** Projects will be judged on their ability to make **proactive stress management solutions to users.**
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Our app has a two-pronged approach—it addresses mental wellness through both healthy eating, and through having fun and stress relief! Additionally, not only is eating healthy a great method of proactive stress management, but another key aspect of being proactive is making your de-stressing activites part of your daily routine. I think this app would really do a great job of that!

Additionally, we also focused really hard on accessibility and ease-of-use. Whether you're on android, iphone, or a computer, it only takes a few seconds to track your healthy eating and play with some cute animals ;)

## How we built it

The front-end is react-native, and the back-end is FastAPI (Python). Aside from our individual talents, I think we did a really great job of working together. We employed pair-programming strategies to great success, since each of us has our own individual strengths and weaknesses.

## Challenges we ran into

Most of us have minimal experience with full-stack development. If you look at my LinkedIn (this is Matt), all of my CS knowledge is concentrated in machine learning!

There were so many random errors with just setting up the back-end server and learning how to make API endpoints, as well as writing boilerplate JS from scratch.

But that's what made this project so fun. We all tried to learn something we're not that great at, and luckily we were able to get past the initial bumps.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

As I'm typing this in the final hour, in retrospect, it really is an awesome experience getting to pull an all-nighter hacking. It makes us wish that we attended more hackathons during college.

Above all, it was awesome that we got to create something meaningful (at least, to us).

## What we learned

We all learned a lot about full-stack development (React Native + FastAPI). Getting to finish the project for once has also taught us that we shouldn't give up so easily at hackathons :)

I also learned that the power of midnight doordash credits is akin to magic.

## What's next for Munch Buddies!

We have so many cool ideas that we just didn't have the technical chops to implement in time

* customizing your munch buddies!
* advanced data analysis on your food history (data science is my specialty)
* exporting your munch buddies and stats!

However, I'd also like to emphasize that any further work on the app should be done WITHOUT losing sight of the original goal. Munch buddies is supposed to be a fun way to promote healthy eating and wellbeing. Some other apps have gone down the path of too much gamification / social features, which can lead to negativity and toxic competitiveness.

## Final Remark

One of our favorite parts about making this project, is that we all feel that it is something that we would (and will) actually use in our day-to-day!
## Inspiration

Amidst the hectic lives and pandemic struck world, mental health has taken a back seat. This thought gave birth to our inspiration of this web based app that would provide activities customised to a person’s mood that will help relax and rejuvenate.

## What it does

We planned to create a platform that could detect a users mood through facial recognition, recommends yoga poses to enlighten the mood and evaluates their correctness, helps user jot their thoughts in self care journal.

## How we built it

Frontend: HTML5, CSS(frameworks used:Tailwind,CSS),Javascript

Backend: Python,Javascript

Server side> Nodejs, Passport js
Database> MongoDB( for user login), MySQL(for mood based music recommendations)

## Challenges we ran into

Incooperating the open CV in our project was a challenge, but it was very rewarding once it all worked .
But since all of us being first time hacker and due to time constraints we couldn't deploy our website externally.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Mental health issues are the least addressed diseases even though medically they rank in top 5 chronic health conditions.
We at umang are proud to have taken notice of such an issue and help people realise their moods and cope up with stresses encountered in their daily lives. Through are app we hope to give people are better perspective as well as push them towards a more sound mind and body
We are really proud that we could create a website that could help break the stigma associated with mental health. It was an achievement that in this website includes so many features to help improving the user's mental health like making the user vibe to music curated just for their mood, engaging the user into physical activity like yoga to relax their mind and soul and helping them evaluate their yoga posture just by sitting at home with an AI instructor.
Furthermore, completing this within 24 hours was an achievement in itself since it was our first hackathon which was very fun and challenging.

## What we learned

We have learnt on how to implement open CV in projects. Another skill set we gained was on how to use Css Tailwind. Besides, we learned a lot about backend and databases and how to create shareable links and how to create to do lists.

## What's next for Umang

While the core functionality of our app is complete, it can of course be further improved .
1)We would like to add a chatbot which can be the user's guide/best friend and give advice to the user when in condition of mental distress.
2)We would also like to add a mood log which can keep a track of the user's daily mood and if a serious degradation of mental health is seen it can directly connect the user to medical helpers, therapist for proper treatement.
This lays grounds for further expansion of our website. Our spirits are up and the sky is our limit
## Inspiration

In the work from home era, many are missing the social aspect of in-person work. And what time of the workday most provided that social interaction? The lunch break. culina aims to bring back the social aspect to work from home lunches. Furthermore, it helps users reduce their food waste by encouraging the use of food that could otherwise be discarded and diversifying their palette by exposing them to international cuisine (that uses food they already have on hand)!

## What it does

First, users input the groceries they have on hand. When another user is found with a similar pantry, the two are matched up and displayed a list of healthy, quick recipes that make use of their mutual ingredients. Then, they can use our built-in chat feature to choose a recipe and coordinate the means by which they want to remotely enjoy their meal together.

## How we built it

The frontend was built using React.js, with all CSS styling, icons, and animation made entirely by us. The backend is a Flask server. Both a RESTful API (for user creation) and WebSockets (for matching and chatting) are used to communicate between the client and server. Users are stored in MongoDB. The full app is hosted on a Google App Engine flex instance and our database is hosted on MongoDB Atlas also through Google Cloud. We created our own recipe dataset by filtering and cleaning an existing one using Pandas, as well as scraping the image URLs that correspond to each recipe.

## Challenges we ran into

We found it challenging to implement the matching system, especially coordinating client state using WebSockets. It was also difficult to scrape a set of images for the dataset. Some of our team members also overcame technical roadblocks on their machines so they had to think outside the box for solutions.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of.

We are proud to have a working demo of such a complex application with many moving parts – and one that has impacts across many areas. We are also particularly proud of the design and branding of our project (the landing page is gorgeous 😍 props to David!) Furthermore, we are proud of the novel dataset that we created for our application.

## What we learned

Each member of the team was exposed to new things throughout the development of culina. Yu Lu was very unfamiliar with anything web-dev related, so this hack allowed her to learn some basics of frontend, as well as explore image crawling techniques. For Camilla and David, React was a new skill for them to learn and this hackathon improved their styling techniques using CSS. David also learned more about how to make beautiful animations. Josh had never implemented a chat feature before, and gained experience teaching web development and managing full-stack application development with multiple collaborators.

## What's next for culina

Future plans for the website include adding videochat component to so users don't need to leave our platform. To revolutionize the dating world, we would also like to allow users to decide if they are interested in using culina as a virtual dating app to find love while cooking. We would also be interested in implementing organization-level management to make it easier for companies to provide this as a service to their employees only. Lastly, the ability to decline a match would be a nice quality-of-life addition.