Hoarder: Technical Report

Curran, Niall (2017) Hoarder: Technical Report. Undergraduate thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

This report outlines my idea to design and develop an everyday shopping mobile application, which utilises a phone camera to scan and recognise barcodes to be used in place of the standard checkout process of a grocery store. At the moment, there is a lack of commercially acceptable shopping apps for in-person shopping, so I have decided to look into different solutions and develop an easily implemented application for both the store and the users alike. Given that the application only requires a phone’s camera and access to the specific shops database for item data, it is very easy to integrate into day-to-day life. In this report, I will explain how the application is intended to be used as well as what happens in the background from when the user scans an item to when they checkout and leave the store.

The inspiration for the application comes from the SuperValu/SuperQuinn device called “SuperScan” which allows a customer to register and pick up a scanning device on entry to the store and use it to scan each of their items to assist with the checkout process. This was a very innovative way of shopping, however, with the development of mobile phone technology it has become outdated, given that we now have a far more powerful machine in all of our pockets, which with the help of the Hoarder application, will allow us to complete the entire checkout process without human interaction. The SuperScan device for example, cannot accommodate payment/checkout and requires staff of the shop having to read the data from the device before manually processing the payment from the customer.

The project consists of a mobile application, a server side application and a NoSQL database. The mobile application allows the user to create an account to use the service, scan each item, pay for their purchases, review any receipts they have from previous purchases and hold the user’s loyalty credit for use in future transactions. The server side application will act as a bridge between the mobile application and the database. You could refer to this application as an API as it carries out all of the main functionality for the mobile application. The android application will send HTTP requests to the server side application and the server side will need to deal with each request accordingly. These requests may include receiving item data when an item is scanned, retrieving user data, adding user data and retrieving the user’s receipts and order details. The database for the Hoarder application is a NoSQL Mongo database which consists of 4 collections. The user collection, the receipt collection, the item collection and the store collection. This database makes contact with the Node.js server to be able to complete the base functions of the application.

Item Type:	Thesis (Undergraduate)
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Computer software T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Computer software Q Science > QA Mathematics > Computer software > Mobile Phone Applications T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Computer software > Mobile Phone Applications H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > Specific Industries > Retail Industry
Divisions:	School of Computing > Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Computing
Depositing User:	Caoimhe Ní Mhaicín
Date Deposited:	01 Nov 2017 12:54
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2017 12:54
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/2714

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