Inspiration
As students, life is full of stress, with assignments and tests taking away our free time. Often, we forget to eat or we end up scrounging for any easy-to-make food that can lead to unhealthy diets and lifestyles. In other words, we students often find ourselves in a struggle between our academics and physical well-being.
What it does
Thus, came the concept of a web app that can provide an easily accessible interface of diet and health tools, saving time and showing students that being health conscious doesn't have to conflict with a rigorous schedule of academics. With a few simple inputs of bodily metrics such as height and weight, we can provide students with an estimation of their BMI (Body Mass Index). Furthermore, students can build their own custom diet by accessing the web app’s large database of various common foods and their nutritional information.
How we built it
The structure and foundation of the web app were created using HTML and stylized with CSS. The functionality of the various components of the webpage such as links, BMI graph, etc was implemented using JavaScript. The UI design uses the Glass UI concept to provide a more modern and clean feeling. As for the back end, we used Express.js, CSV parsing and key file storage to set up endpoints and get the food nutrition data.
Challenges we ran into
Naturally, like any good product, we ran into a few bumps along the way. Given the limited time period, we had to decide on which aspects of our web app we wanted to prioritize on. Thus, quite some time was spent on trying to determine which health indicator we wanted to use and what database we wanted as our reference of nutritional information. Graphing the BMI chart was also new territory for us, and there was some additional trouble implementing that.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Perhaps, the biggest accomplishment that we’re proud of is the fact that we managed to create a working web app, with some practical function in under 48 hours! Also, we were able to create a BMI graph using Chart.js, something brand new for all of us!
What we learned
Working on this project, we improved and learned more about web development using html, javascript, and css. Particularly, we learned more about the javascript library (Chart.js) which could definitely be useful in future projects! Not only did we learn and improve upon our technical skills; but we as students ourselves, also learned a bit about the nutritional information of some of the common foods that we eat while sifting through databases. Thus, we in turn are at least somewhat more informed of how many of some of the important macromolecules we typically get and what we may want to change in our diet!
What's next for Health is Wealth
What’s the next step? The current web app is merely a starting point for what we think can evolve in something truly helpful and beneficial to students! We’re looking to expand upon the functions of this healthy web app by including more health indicators and metrics, expansion of the database of food with nutritional information, and even recommend customized, healthy diets based on a student’s preferences! There’s an endless number of functionalities to add on!
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