During this week, I presented for my group’s proposal presentation on Monday. My group and I initially worked together to expand on some of the ideas from our abstract and accurately reflected them onto the required themes of the presentation. I was then able to elaborate on the slide requirements to help the audience better gauge our product use. Since we had already established our problem and solution requirements, reasonable quantitative metrics were defined that state facts about our system.
Using the hardware components my team members scoped out, I was able to sketch a mockup of our envisioned product in CAD with the corresponding dimensions to be included in our solution approach. I believe this was an important step to visually demonstrate to our audience how users would utilize our food tracking product in realtime. Afterwards, the steps to the project were split into three different components that could be worked on asynchronously: image classification, storing scanned information to a cloud database, and the website interface for users to interact on.
Moving onto technical challenges and testing verification, communication between each component would be hard to achieve in an efficient manner since image classification, scale weighing, and forwarding backend calculations to the database would all need to be processed and displayed in a relatively short amount of time. There also exists the decision of choosing between a wireless implementation or connecting our hardware to be offloaded to a computer for debugging purposes. We will decide between the two upon further testing. In parallel to the steps of our solution approach, verification and metrics were defined to guide our initialization process.
In terms of progress, I am on schedule with what I wanted to accomplish this week. However, upon receiving feedback during our Q&A session and overall notes from the faculty, there are many additional factors that need to be considered. I will need to review more on the technicalities of the OCR algorithms we will be testing with. Additionally, we have established that cooked meals will not be part of our testing plan and our product serves more as an inventory tracker for food.
A mockup of the website framework has been created that allows users to login through either a new account or Google OAuth. At the moment upon logging in, there is dummy data that will eventually be the food items users scan in. I plan to add functionality that lets users delete food items as they desire to be added to the total macronutrients count. Also, my group and I may discuss more on how interactive we would like to make this user interface and ask Professor Savvides for additional feedback.