Developers: Jordan Reichgut, Eileen Mao, Sarah Jang, Christina Di
Made at PennApps XIX, University of Pennsylvania
February 2019

SUMMARY

Allergen is a mobile application for food allergy sufferers. It simplifies the process of safety-checking foods by identifying allergens in the ingredients. Users input their allergies and search for a food product, and the app cross-checks the product's ingredients against a database of the top 10 most popular allergies. The ingredients are then listed with the offending ones highlighted.

WHO ARE WE

We are students at Carnegie Mellon University studying Information Systems and Electrical and Computer Engineering. We created this project for the HealthHacks category of PennApps XIX.

TECH STACK

Allergen is developed with React Native, a cross-platform JS framework. It uses the USDA Database API to search for foods and retrieve authentic, up-to-date nutrition information.

GOING FORWARD

Allergen is a tool that was born out of necessity (our teammate Jordan has wheat and corn allergies). As many as 15 million people in the U.S. alone are allergic to at least one food. All those people would benefit from a tool like Allergen. Therefore, this app has the potential to be more than a hackathon project. We plan to develop it further and eventually publish it.

Jordan Reichgut - CMU Information Systems '20
Eileen Mao - CMU Information Systems '21
Sarah Jang - CMU Electrical & Computer Engineering '21
Christina Di - CMU Electrical & Computer Engineering '21