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A frequent concern of parents is the difficulty in controlling their children's eating habits at school, as children need healthy snacks to support their growth and development. Unfortunately, many of the snacks provided in the school canteen are high in fat, sugar and salt. This type of food appeals to children’s tastes, however, the excess of these snacks in children’s diets can lead to nutritional deficiencies. Furthermore, it is difficult to guarantee that children diagnosed with food allergies or intolerances do not eat foods containing ingredients that may cause a reaction. On top of that, kids might not know how to manage their money well and end up spending too much.
The project tries to solve these problems with a system that allows parents to manage the options of snacks shown to their kids, and a vending machine to distribute these snacks. It will be composed of three main modules: the cloud server, the vending machine and the mobile application.
The mobile application will enable parents to establish daily limits on specific snacks and choose which ones will be accessible for their children via the vending machine. This guarantees that parents maintain active control over their children's food selections.
The vending machine will be equipped NFC reader to facilitate child authentication. Once authenticated, they can choose from the available snacks, which have been previously determined by parents through the app.
The principal interactions between these modules can be observed in the block diagram below.
This application will allow the parents to register their children in the system. Then, they will be able to select the specific snacks that will be available for their children to buy. Also, it will allow to put daily limit in the budget of snacks.
The application will be implemented using React Native, so it will work in IOS and Android phones.
The vending machine will read the NFC tag of the child and ask for the selection of the validation image. After the correct authentication of the user, the machine will show all the available authorized food options to the user, along with the available budget. When the user selects the desired product, the vending machine will ask for confirmation and then provide the snack to the user. After the product is dispensed, the vending machine will return to the unauthenticated state.
