The Inspiration: How healthy do you think you are? Are you healthier than your friends? Now you can compare yourself with them! And even with the entire world population! Gamification of data has always been something that amazes both of us, especially in a society where everybody is connected online and we like to compare and compete with each other. We are also concerned about the health issues related to the bad alimentation habits of the population nowadays, and the feeding disorders that a big part of humanity has. This little project with huge projection is the combination of our interests and passions with a delicate and severe worldwide problem.
What does Healthometer do? Healthometer takes the calories you ingested and the time frame you ate them, as well as your weight and your sex and gives you a score 0-100 of how healthy you are. This score or GPA will be recorded and will update itself each time you add a "record of calories" (ROC for short) to the site. Not only this, as soon as you enter your first ROC, you will become part of a World Health Ranking where you can compare your score with other users. In the Menu option you can also find a "My Stats" chart and see your progress through a timeline.
How did we build Healthometer? It was a process done from scratch, even the idea came up within the HackCU schedule. First we developed the idea and what exactly we wanted our project to do, since the options were infinite. We shared the code via Codeshare, and built everything with html, css and javascript, to relate the website operations with the code behind.
About the challenges... The Database: since we don't use a database for the web, we have instead built a not operative prototype that shows the functionalities of our proposal. Only one of us had experience with web design, so the process also involved fast learning and patience teaching. The Ranking and Stats options were the most difficult parts of the program to code, and the ones that took the most time to develop. Designing a website can be such a difficult task... Especially when the resources are limited and the time is short. The implementation of the main ideas we had that seemed easy to process were the hardest to implement! But the result looks very nice and we are very happy with our work.
Sweet accomplishments: This idea is a very good way to spread awareness among all humankind about a proper alimentation, and we are very proud of how this can help to improve the world we live in any way. It was the first time for one of us! We are glad this did not prevent the project from progressing and get to a satisfying end. In addition, having a final project uploaded to the internet that everybody can have access to is a nice way of spreading our idea and having people using it and giving us feedback.
Learnings: We learned sooo much doing this project. Not only about the languages used, the relations between them, website building, codesharing... but also about dividing the tasks and working as a team. The programmation part took a lot of research not only for coding functions and tips, but also for color match and presentation techniques. This type of work also forces you to manage time and be able to choose what is really important and what can be dismissed. Counselling each other and debating each step was hard but very fun, and we are already looking forward to the next HackCU.
And... What's next for Healthometer? This project has a lot that can be done in the future, here are some ideas we have and wish we had the time to implement: Separate the users into "leagues" (silver, platinum, gold, diamond...) such that they would move up or down depending on their diet. Even get food discounts as an incentive to use Healthometer more often and scale up in their stats. Instead of using as an input the number of calories ingested, an implementation could be added so that the user inputs the food he or she ate and the program itself would calculate the calories and give the grading answer. We could also implement a connection with the databases of apps like "Yuka" that grade the quality and healthiness of food from their barcode, and make a grading of your diet. What if we make a mobile App so that the interaction with the user is easier? What if we could recommend people what to buy via this App? We could even give them QR discounts for their next shopping cart based on their good GPA! The options are unlimited.
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