Inspiration
A good friend of ours, Jeff Bail, is a diabetic, and whenever we go out to meals, he has to estimate how much insulin he should give himself for the meal. However, if he does not have access to the carbohydrate count of the food (as he often does not), a lot of guesswork goes into this process. So, we wanted to help alleviate this problem.
What it does
Our app allows users to search for a variety of foods, categorized as either branded or generic foods, and find both the carbohydrates for that food and the corresponding amount of insulin they should administer to themselves, based on their insulin to carbohydrate ratio. Our app also provides calorie and protein information for the given food because, although not necessarily relevant to diabetics, many users want these metrics, and this makes it easy for them to find. The user can also favorite foods for permanent use, and easily remove their favorites.
How we built it
We built the app using Swift 3.0 and XCode 8.3.3. It should be able to run on any iOS device, although the format is only guaranteed to look good on iPhones. The data is stored using SQLite.
Challenges we ran into
Getting SQLite to work was difficult, as neither of our team members had ever used it, and it is not the easiest API to interface with in Swift. We also had trouble determining a good API to use, as some of the ones we tested did not have as good of results as we were hoping.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to create an app that could provide value to diabetics, who represent a significant portion of the population, but are often forgotten about. Furthermore, we are proud that we were to be able to quickly create a project from scratch that we feel is a good application and provides actual value to customers.
What we learned
We learned a lot about the process of creating iOS apps, how important teamwork is to creating a great project, and how to load a robust data source into an iOS app.
What's next for Insulin Helper
We will consider putting it on the app store after possibly adding more value to it. We will consider letting users track their carbs for the day and adding a calculator for calculating the total amount of insulin to administer when getting the carbs for multiple foods.
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