Pangasinan students bag award for nutrition app

URDANETA CITY—It all started with a slice of pizza.

As they ate their snack one afternoon in June, three information technology students of the Urdaneta City University (UCU)—Marvin Trecenio, Byron Jan Mairina and Justine Louise Villanueva—exchanged jokes about the nutritional benefits of pizza.

Then one of them blurted out: What if we develop an application that could provide people the nutrition facts of the food that they eat?

Four months later, Trecenio, Mairina and Villanueva produced NutriVision, an android application (app).

On Nov. 19, NutriVision won the P100,000 grand prize in the productivity/utility category of this year’s Google Developers Group’s Android Masters, an intercollegiate competition for android programmers. A total of 193 colleges and universities in the country participated in the contest.

The app also won another award for being the most downloaded application in two weeks.

It was sweet victory for the UCU, a city government-owned university, which joined the contest for the first time.

NutriVision could be downloaded for free from Google Play, the official app store for android smartphones and tablets, Trecenio said.

The app opens by giving users four options: search food, capture food, browse for food photos and say the food name.

In the “search food” option, a user may type the name of the food he or she wants to eat and know its nutrition details. The “say the food name” option responds to a user’s voice.

The “browse for food” option allows a user to search for photographs in his or her device’s photo gallery.

The app’s main feature, the “capture food” option, allows a user to take a picture of the food he or she eats to know its nutritional benefits.

Limmuel Ocay, UCU faculty member and team adviser, said the development of the app is consistent with the team’s health advocacy because it helps people live a healthy lifestyle by watching their diet through the app.

He said most of those who download the app are health-conscious people and fitness junkies.

“This is a work in progress. We are thinking of integrating in the app any food that is good for certain illnesses,” Ocay said.

Soon, he said, users could also browse pictures of food served by the different fast-food chains.

So far, the app has been getting good reviews in Google Play, Ocay said. People have also sent emails to his team to express their appreciation for the app.

“We now have a 4.9 rating out of 5. Users have been leaving comments telling us that the app is very useful and functional, especially in determining the number of calories and amount of saturated fat, in the food that they eat,” Ocay said.