Health Kidz

Children's Nutrition Tracker

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Inspiration

First, let’s talk about my initial motivation for building this application. It all started when I saw my mother hiring a nutrition specialist to make a daily menu for her kindergarten. I was quite curious about this process, and I wondered what I could do to optimize the process. This question kept lingering in my head for a week before I went on a field trip with my WoW club members.

It was really fun until I saw some kids who were severely malnutrition, as they kept eating randomly whatever was given to them. I was really shocked at the scene, and the school was not really poor either: it was a Christian church.

So, I thought of an idea: How about creating an application that is tailored to tracking kids’ nutritional needs? So that no kid would be undernourished like that ever again! I began researching on how an application could suffice those needs.

From the experience of a product manager at Nextway, I did my research scientifically. Firstly, I would want to analyze the current competitors on the market, and I must accept the fact that the idea is not unique, and there have been a lot of innovations in the market already. So, I need to have a new feature in my application that there’s no competitor has. I then used my analytical skills, learnt from my revered CTO Thuan Nguyen, observing your surroundings, finding small details that nobody looked for.

What it does

When it comes to its function, Health Kidz is an AI-powered nutrition coach that helps parents and guardians track, analyze, and improve their children’s diets.

The app lets users log meals; suggest dietary needs based on height, weight, and age; and view detailed nutrition breakdowns with charts and progress tracking.

It also features a personalized AI chatbot used Gemini API that provides meal recommendations, guidance for picky eaters, and tailored insights based on each child’s age, growth, and health profile.

Alongside tracking, Health Kidz offers an educational corner with curated resources to help families make smarter food choices, all in a mobile-friendly, secure, and easy-to-use platform.

How we built it

Since I'm a high school student, I had to learn from scratch, everything needed in application development, from basic programming languages like JavaScript, HTML, CSS to Tailwind, TypeScript, and even SQL.

Though I have got a basic understanding of coding, I still found it difficult to make a project on my own without assistance from AI.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge for me was understanding the code made by AI. I understand the power of AI, as it can help us develop a full-stack app easily, but this is when the problem arises.

When the free usage is out, I had to debug the code all by myself, and the generated code was just like spaghetti code, and I couldn't understand anything at all.

I remembered taking two days to fully understand the code before actually building and fixing it by myself.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing I'm proud of is that I was able to deliver a full-stack application as a high school student. This means a lot to me, as I was scared of coding at first.

What we learned

Through this project, I learnt that every hardship, tests, or exam are just challenges to overcome, just as I did while debugging day and night.

The process taught me resilience, problem-solving, and the mindset that nothing is impossible—skills I can now carry forward into future projects.

What's next for Health Kidz

In the future, I hope I can expand the features for my application, especially in the meal logging function, where parents can take photos of the meals, and the app will automatically calculate the calories and other nutrients.

Furthermore, I want the application to be able to track other macronutrients like Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and so on.

Built With

  • and-capacitor-for-mobile.-styled-with-tailwind-css
  • and-radix-ui.-integrated-apis-include-gemini-(ai-coaching)
  • auth
  • authentication
  • capacitor-(mobile-app-builds-for-android/ios)-database:-postgresql-(via-supabase)-apis-&-ai-services:-gemini-(ai-nutrition-coach)
  • edamam
  • edamam-and-spoonacular-(recipes-&-nutrition-data)
  • edge-functions)
  • javascript-frameworks-&-libraries:-react
  • languages:-typescript
  • radix-ui
  • row-level-security
  • shadcn/ui
  • spoonacular
  • supabase-(postgres
  • tailwind-css
  • tanstack/react-query-platforms-&-cloud-services:-supabase-(database
  • usda
  • usda-food-database-other-tools:-date-fns
  • vercel-(deployment)
  • vite
  • zod
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