Blossom

Inspiration

Apps like MyFitnessPal has over 200 million users who aim to use the app to track their nutrition uptake, and hit their health goals. However:

75% of people stated that apps like MyFitnessPal have had at least somewhat contributed to their eating disorder
25% of women our age (18-22) are eating directly according to a weight-loss diet, with women less likely to eat intuitively than men

This is a problem that is affecting a wide population - people want to maintain a healthy lifestyle but often fall into cycles of restrictive eating due to nutritional calorie tracking apps like MyFitnessPal. Thus, we ask the question: How might we help individuals intuitively track their nutrient intake, enabling them to make informed food choices and effectively better nourish their bodies?

Our ultimate goal is to help people intuitively eat such that they: (1) Eat when hungry rather than relying on cognitive rules to dictate when, what, and how much to eat (2) Eat in response to physical rather than emotional hunger (3) Awareness of and trust in internal signals to guide eating food choices that largely nourish and support the health and functioning of the body

What it does

In Blossom, we aim to help the user visually track their nutrition uptake, sans the numbers. With each new food they consume, the user inputs it into the app and can watch their garden grow. This visual representation of the food they consume offers a growth and nourishment mindset, such that rather than reducing intake of certain foods, add other foods to increase greater nourishment. As the user adds more food, we aim to make helpful suggestions as they grow their garden to ensure that there is a well-balanced variety of plants, encouraging variety in food consumption.

How we built it

Due to time constraints, we were only able to complete the hi-fidelity Figma prototypes - but in the future hope to build it with React Native to make it cross-platform.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into problems fleshing out how to help the user visually track their nutrition consumption, without falling into using numerical/chart amounts of food like traditional calorie or nutrient tracking apps. Thus, figuring out how we wanted to depict this while still being informative to the user was our greatest challenge - and why we spent a significant amount of time developing our prototypes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figma Prototype and our problem space research

What we learned

Spline + Blender is hard :(

What's next for Blossom

Implementation (haha!)

Long-term vision:

To provide articles with knowledge on different food groups, encouraging users to learn more about how their food consumption serves them. Create an encouraging and supportive space for users to share and connect on their nourishment journey Build a platform to have 1:1 with trusted nutritionists to provide personalized nutrition advice