Samara Students Have Created a Pocket Nutritionist

Samara University’s students have created an electronic assistant ready to help with answering the age-old, sacramental question, “What’s for dinner (or lunch) today?” Young software developers have designed the application for smartphones, which will automatically tell you what dishes can be prepared from the food available at home. 

The user of the application, called ChefAI, will only need to point the smartphone camera at the contents of the shelves in the refrigerator or show the smartphone the receipt from a grocery store, after which, having used the neural network, the application will display the set of recipes for various dishes. The recipes will be selected and adjusted according to the settings made in advance: the user’s taste preferences or diet requirements, the instructions of the attending physician, the total calorie intake, national and religious traditions, and so on.

“ChefAI is a smart application that uses a specially trained neural network and the recommendation system to build the strategy for rational nutrition and helps a person to choose recipes for cooking, based on the food products available. The application can be useful, for example, for students who do not have much experience in cooking, or housewives who would like to diversify their home menu, while using the maximum stocks of familiar food products. It is also helpful for those who work hard and who do not have time to go shopping every day. ChefAI will save money and time on planning home meals, and will also help to preserve health — the filtering system used in the application takes into account a variety of dietary features of the users, for example, diets, medical restrictions, allergies to certain foods. The application can also take into account peculiarities of nutrition, given national and religious traditions, for example, features of nutrition during fasting,” said the project manager Georgy Krasavin, a third-year student of Samara University’s Institute of Informatics and Cybernetics.

The application is based on the trained YOLOv8 neural network model. This version of the computer vision model detects observed objects very quickly and accurately, classifying them. As for the application itself, it has so far been written only for Android smartphones, but it is planned to make ChefAI multiplatform, like banking applications. The trial version of ChefAI is currently being tested.

As the project manager noted, the idea of ‘crossing’ neural networks and “Book about Delicious and Healthy Food” is certainly not unique, and similar applications, of course, are in the market, but most of them are developed abroad and do not have support for the Russian language. Moreover, the Samara application favorably differs from its competitors with its ability to quickly scan available food or store receipts using a smartphone camera: in similar applications, the list of food products must, as a rule, be typed manually on the keyboard. 

By the way, the developers plan to add to the new version of ChefAI another convenient way to tell the app, which products you have at home — just voice their list into the microphone of your smartphone. Advantages of the Samara application also include the very detailed filtering system for selecting recipes. The application is designed not only for one user, but also for the whole family, it can also make a family-wide menu, considering requirements and restrictions for each family member.

There are four students in the ChefAI development team. This project has now been applied to the Innovation Assistance Fund for participation in the competition within the Student Startup Program. There is already a commercial partner: a company from Tatarstan will help the student project to enter the market. Downloading and starting to use the ChefAI application are planned to be possible in January 2025.

“In future, we are going to create a kind of ‘superapp’ on the basis of ChefAI, the superapp that will include many functions and capabilities in the field of nutrition: for example, adding the option to deliver groceries and ready meals, connect the menu of restaurants and cafes. There is also an idea to found the social food network where people could communicate with each other on the topics of delicious and healthy food,” noted Georgy Krasavin.

For reference

Nutritionist (from Latin. nutritio — nutrition) is a specialist in the field of proper nutrition, who uses his knowledge to compile an optimal diet depending on individual needs and human health.