This app is built using ionic framework and typescript.
I am very concerned about my hair health. Well, not that concerned, but I do recognize that some people may be concerned. And I may end up concerned. The problem is that I have not yet found an app out there that addresses the tracking of the hair follicle liveliness, at least not in a simple way. However, a modern cellphone, with a camera and flash, may be able to address this problem. By directing the flash of a cellphone on a hair patch, the captured image will look different if the hair patch is less or more dense. This difference can be captured by the cellphone's camera, and further, useful and trackable information about the hairs' status can be investigated.
As such, I've built a simple app that takes a hair patch, as taken by a cellphone's camera, and compares that hair patch to an image of the skin. By comparing the hair patch to the skin patch, I can then come up with an index that represents how the hair is doing, which can be tracked over time in order to say something about hair loss or hair quality in a very quantitative way.
I used typescript with the ionic framework, in order to build a good-looking app from the start with minimal time spent on the look of the app and maximum time spent on how the app works.
One of the challenges I faced was how to convert the string64 images that were gotten in typescript (a javascript look-a-like), which is primarily used to infuse front-end logic, and not used as a bespoke imaging analysis framework, into a useable RGB format. Apart for this little challenge, the rest of the project was smooth sailing.
I was able to carry out the entire software development (and I am not a software developer), which was pretty empowering.
I learned about the typescript environment, as well as the ionic framework environment. Add to that the current cellphone-based strategies out there for baldness detection and tracking.
I think that as a submission to a Hackathon is good enough for this app. If more comes out of it, that's also mighty acceptable.