Safe Eats App

Food allergies and allergic reactions are a problem that many people face (roughly 50 million Americans experience yearly allergies) in their daily lives. Looking out for products that could aggravate these allergies can be very difficult for college students who are living on their own for the first time. Knowing what foods they can and cannot eat is essential. For example, anaphylactic shock can take up to a week to recover from, in severe cases. With the busy schedules and newfound independence associated with being a college student, it is important that access to information concerning allergens is easily available.

To solve this problem, we implemented an iOS application where students can easily view allergen information for on-campus dining halls at Virginia Tech. The main goal was to make the system faster and easier to use than the current Virginia Tech Dining Services website, in order to provide students with an easy way to check allergen information on the go. As it stands, Virginia Tech’s current implementation of distributing nutritional information about the food they serve is quite outdated, relying on a Windows IIS/8.5 server, with search latencies reaching upwards of 8 seconds and over 6 seconds for lookup latency. So, we worked to streamline the presentation of Virginia Tech Dining Halls nutritional and allergen data for students and faculty with allergen risks at Virginia Tech.

The final deliverables of this project include a partially functioning iOS application, a final report, and a set of presentation slides submitted to our sponsor, Dr. Edward Fox, our clients, Deborah Nichols and Candice Matthis, as well as Ashley Foster from Virginia Tech Dining Services. The report and presentation have progressed through our stages of development, including the project initiation -- in which we received criteria from the client and broke down deliverables, the planning stage -- in which a list of tasks was compiled, the execution stage -- which made up most of the development process, the testing phase -- in which we deployed the application to a small sample group, and the closing process -- where the product was presented to the clients and sponsor.