CogniDiet™️: Cognitive Assistance in Preventing Food Allergies
Keywords: App assistance, Computer vision, Food menu
CogniDiet is a PowerApp that allows users to scan text on menus and food labels to immersively highlight ingredients based on dietary restrictions of different user groups. Using machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR) technologies supported by Microsoft's Azure and Power Platforms, it superimposes these ingredients over a menu or food label. Users can also add specific allergens to their profile, and CogniDiet will provide customized results in seconds.
“Selected for You”
The soft menu is cognitive
Problem
Even a tiny amount of the allergy-causing food can trigger signs and symptoms such as digestive problems, hives, or swollen airways. For some people, a food allergy can cause severe symptoms or even a life-threatening reaction (anaphylaxis). Abide by FDA regulation, the food ingredients that may cause allergies are required to be noted on the packaging. However, the information is either too comprehensive to read within a glance, or unable to include every allergy source. In some restaurants, such information is also missing from the menu if not asked.
Ideation
How might we design an intuitive tool to help people with different allergies quickly identify if the food is safe? Cognitive Services provides a robust AI service to reliably extract printed and handwritten text from menus or food labels. This was core to the functionality and development of Cogni-Diet™️. Power Apps increases the agility of Cogni-Diet™️ due to its low-code platform and provides a clean cross-platform UX. Power Automate streamlines API calls to Azure Cognitive Services.
1. Take a picture of the menu or descriptions on the food package
2. Choose diet camera filter for preventing personal allergy food or choosing diet preference
3. Irritants or alarmed food ingredients are outlined in red by applying Optical Character Recognition
4. Suitable meal plans or dishes are quickly highlighted
5. Diet camera filters can be customized by following an intuitive guide
6. History records of pictured meals or food packages can be saved
7. Diet records can be shared to close friends, nutritionists, or doctors to analyze if emergent food allergy occurs
