Abstract
Consumer products industry constitutes a major chunk of the country’s economy and commerce activities. In an effort to cut costs and increase revenue on these consumer products, manufacturers often resort to using poor quality raw materials or set low quality control standards. These practices have direct consequences on consumer safety and often lead to severe health issues or fatalities. A recent study reports that property damage from consumer product incidents costs the nation, millions of dollars annually. Therefore, to avoid these incidents, the Consumer Safety Protection Commission (CPSC) funded by the Federal Government of the United States, maintain a database of all such incidents. Its vision is customer safety and its aim is to protect customers and their families from products that pose a fire, electrical, chemical or mechanical hazard. Consumers can submit reports of incidents related to products that have occurred to them, the agency then puts them online for everybody to see after verifying it. The issue with this approach is that it is highly time consuming and inconvenient to look up for one particular product in the vast list of items available. Also, data is in the form of xml records, which makes it extremely difficult to traverse through the entire data, even for tech savvy users. The time taken to look up the necessary data on the CPSC website can be considerably reduced by extracting just the relevant information and making it accessible on the go, by creating a mobile application. In this project, we obtain data from the SaferProducts.gov API, eliminate irrelevant information and store it in a database that is linked to the front-end application. When a user wants to look up a product, he/she simply points a mobile device at a product and takes a picture, the application then looks up that particular product and tells the user if it is unsafe to use. The creation of this application involves data extraction, data preprocessing and data presentation. The android front-end is designed using Android Studio and the database is created using SQLite library.