Inspiration:
In one of the public health classes I am currently taking, I learned that people are usually not aware of how our body gains and loses weight. The low-income citizens, who lack proper health education, make poor decisions when they choose which food to eat, making those people prone to diabetes and obesity. We thought that it was necessary for everyone to have access to a convenient application that helps them understand how our body works. Therefore, we have decided to create an application that calculates an individual's metabolism rate and that contains more than 8000 food ingredients and food types to calculate how much a person can consume after every meal. Thus, the user can make healthier decisions to prevent obesity and diabetes.
How it works:
Our application first measures the user's body mass index and metabolism rate by gathering the user's height, weight, age, and gender. After the user inputs all the necessary data and calculates the BMI and metabolism rate, the application saves the individual's data into the application. After doing so, the user can keep track of how much calorie he has consumed by searching the type of food he or she ate during any time of the day in the application. Then, the application will automatically deduct the amount of calories from his or her metabolism rate, allowing the user to keep track of how much more calories he or she can consume. Also, the application has a 24 hour reset window since the metabolism rate is renewed every day. If the user consumed less than the metabolism rate, the user will lose body fat, as if the user eats beyond the metabolism rate, the user will gain fat. By having this in mind, the users can easily check how much food they can eat to either lose weight or gain weight.
Challenges we ran into:
Even though we had a clear goal in this project, we suddenly had an impulse to take the application to a new level. We thought that we could possibly add a new feature where the application maximizes nutrient within a given budget. At first, it seemed like we were able to code without any problem, but we realized that it is very complicated to maximize every nutrient within a given budget. Also, we thought of using geo-tagging feature to allow users to find restaurants around them and save the local restaurant's menus and calories on our database, but we faced great technical difficulties, making us give up on this plan.
Accomplishments that we are proud of:
Even though we ran out of time due to the failure of our application's expansion version, we managed to create an application that helps individuals make more healthier decisions when they choose food. We really hope that people learn to make healthier choices by using our application in the future.
What we learned:
We learned that it is very difficult to make a functioning application within a restricted time. However, we put ourselves together to finish tasks towards the end and eventually finished making the application. Also, we learned to make applications using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PhoneGap.
What's next for HealthiNBudget:
We hope to make an expansion set for this application so that the individuals can not only see the calorie progress but also keep track of necessary nutrients, such as protein and vitamins. Also, we hope to install the maximizing feature to our application because then individual users can easily find which food to eat within their budget limit and to find foods that contain the required nutrition.
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