Competition Details
Team: Yu Xuan (me), Chong Yao, Tom Woodley
Time to Build: 5.5 hours
This was our first hackathon in Ireland. With minimal expectations and plenty of uncertainty, we stepped into the contest. Once the theme and rubric were announced, we got straight to work, as this was the shortest hackathon we had ever tackled. We ended the competition in third place—something we never expected!
Timeline
| Agenda | Time Allocated |
|---|---|
| Brainstorming ideas | 1.5 hours |
| Challenging Perspectives and Ideas | 10 mins |
| Spec Sheet Drafting | 20 mins |
| Programming | 3.5 hours |
| Presentation | Async with Programming |
Our Idea
We wanted to design an app that promotes healthy eating among families by turning healthy eating into a game: family members compete against each other, scoring points on a leaderboard and receiving stats at the end of each week. This allows each member to gain insights on how to improve their diet.
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production
Key Features
Free
- Family feed with reactions
- End-of-week stats
- Personalized diet insights
Premium (Designed as “nice extras”)
- Social media post generation
- Send a healthy meal
- Grocery recommendations and budget planner
Key Concerns and What We Improved
- User churn rate on digital tracking apps
We designed the app so that snapping a photo before a meal takes only 2 seconds, minimizing user hassle. - Cheating within self-reporting apps
The app is centered around friendly inter-family competition, leaving minimal incentive to cheat. - Poor photo quality causing the AI to misidentify food
- Auto-exposure for photo capture
- sVLMs improve detection accuracy since they are trained on diverse photos
OpenRouter Usage
sVLMs (gemini-3.8-flash)
- Process daily food photos
- Generate quick insights and scores
- Generate food descriptions
LLMs with reasoning (gpt-6-luna)
- Generate weekly insights
Conclusion and Future Improvements
- We spent too much time brainstorming ideas; ideally, 1 hour should be the maximum limit to brainstorm, discuss, and challenge ideas
- Tailor the presentation to the rubric (we missed out on the Stripe points)
- Set up async workflows and testing early rather than at the end
- Implement critical features first! (We missed the Stripe payment page)
- Set up Supabase properly upfront instead of scrambling with RLS and unexpected errors
Overall, we had a great time at the hackathon, with exciting conversations with mentors and engineers from Stripe! We won third place because our idea was well-implemented and clearly addressed an important pain point; adhering closely to the scoring rubric also helped us advance to the finals. We hope to come back next year, even stronger and better!
Photos
Presentation and Code Links
Presentation: Slides Link
Frontend Code: https://github.com/ochongyao/nurtrition-frontend
Backend Code: https://github.com/yxlow07/nurtrition-backend/
