Weight-Loss Help with a nutrition application

[stgodd]

Hello!

As part of a university project I need to design an application (either for the web or a Smart phone) to help people maintain a balanced and healthy diet. This application is intended to record the food you have eaten during the day/week and based on the results it will guide the user to improve their eating habits. As part of my research I would like to find out what real people see as important features in a nutrition application.

So I would like to know things such as which types of nutrition you would like feedback on? Are calories important to you? Is the ratio of food types you eat (fruit, vegetables ,meat and dairy etc.) important to you? Would you like feedback on the amount of vitamins/minerals you have been eating with your diet? Anything like this would be very helpful.

Any comments, questions or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

 

[Holly88]

Hello, sounds like a good project.

When I'm tracking what I've been eating I like to know the following (in order of importance): calories, total fat, saturated fat, fibre, sodium, protein. Protein should probably be higher on that list to be honest and I think it would be for a lot of other dieters who are concerned about maintaining muscle mass. But calories are easily most important to me.

I have never taken much notice of the ratios of different food groups that I consume personally.

I think if you could make something that points out a trend of deficiency in certain vitamins or minerals that would be really interesting but if the application depends on the user inputting the values for foods then it's way too time consuming to input that kind of detail.

Which brings me onto my main problem with any device that tracks nutritional information. It all depends on the database it uses. To get some kind of accurate estimation of calories etc, you've got to input information manually on the certain brands of foods you eat, this is time consuming and can really put people off. I would never swap the program I use currently simply because it's taken me so long to build up that individual information.

I hope that helped.

 

[stgodd]

Yeah thanks, that was helpfull.

For inputing the nutritional information i was hoping to intigrate a barcode scanning system into it. so the user could scan the barcode of the item they ate and it would automaticly update their records.

Obviously this will not solve the problem completely as not everything comes with a barcode, but it should be an improvement over existing applications i have seen.

Oh, and may i ask which app you are currently using?

 

[Holly88]

Well that sounds ace. Very useful!

I use sparkpeople.com's nutrition tracker. It's not the best but it's easy to navigate and, as I said, has all my personal information on it.

 

[Toddless]

Is this only going as far as the design phase, or are you actually going to execute it? Only reason I ask is because I've been designing an app myself, but I have little programming exp.