Stemming from our love of pets and unhealthy junk food consumption, we wanted to create an application that promotes a healthy diet incentivized by sustaining the life of a virtual companion. We think we can promote mobile health to all audiences this way.
Octocat provides a fun and responsible way to track your dietary health! By snapping a picture of what you eat on the app, you will also feed your pet with it. Octocat will then respond depending on how healthy the food is. If unhealthy, Octocat will gag. If healthy, Octocat will beam! Be careful though, a cat only has nine lives and Octocat can’t take too much punishment. Happy eating!
We primarily utilized the Android Studio IDE to build Octocat. Using Java and XML files, we connected our app to the Android phone’s camera for picture-taking capability. Then, we utilized image labeling from Google’s Firebase machine learning kit and visual API to process and label images. Finally, we brought in our Octocat from Giphy via the Transposit API.
We ran into the issue of displaying the GIFs on the image view of the emulator’s camera. Eventually, we were able to construct the proper code for inserting the gifs into the interface of our app. Another challenge we encountered was figuring out how to determine if food was unhealthy or not. Given the time constraint, we opted to use an in-app small database as criteria to determine healthy versus unhealthy.
We’re proud we managed to embed GIFs onto our Android app. It was difficult but very exciting when we succeeded! We would like to thank Transposit for their support in implementing their API in our project. The ability to capture and process images as a primary mechanic of our application was something we are proud of, as we could truly experience first-hand the power of our code.
At its core, we learned how to use Android Studio to build an app from the ground up. It was a completely new experience and we were challenged with editing XML files, familiarizing ourselves with the documentation, installing Firebase as a machine learning back end, and using the Transposit API all for the first time. While we could have done more, we found that creating an Android app with little to no experience was already a huge accomplishment in itself for us. By the way, the Octocats really liked those loaded pizzas!
We send Octopet to space! And then we find out if they can survive without gravity. I guess it depends on what my next meal going to be. owoctowo uwu