Find Halal foods with Japanese software

A PhD student in Kyushu University’s department of earth resources engineering, designed HalalMinds to help fellow Muslims locate and identify the sometimes elusive halal products available in Japan. The free app launched for Android on April 3 and for i OS on April 28.

The main feature of HalalMinds is a bar-code scanner that can be used while grocery shopping. Once an item is scanned, it is matched against the app’s database of approximately 500,000 products to determine if it is halal or not. This is especially useful for those who cannot read Japanese, as food labels often contain complex kanji characters. HalalMinds The app also provides a halal restaurant locator, a “Qibla compass” that shows the correct direction to face for daily prayers, and daily Qur'an verses. HalalMinds has been downloaded more than 1,100 times since launching less than a month ago. At present, the app is only available in English, but additional language support may come at a later date.