Blogs

When we met last Tuesday we were assigned to come up with 10 total fast food restaurants that are most popular these days. From those ten we provided nutrition facts and picked items to rank on their menu. Of those three items they can either be "woah, slow or go" ratings. Although something may be ranked as slow or woah it is always possibly to make it healthier by switching to a wheat bread or no bread at all, changing condiments that are on the item, eliminating the french fries, etc.

I continued to explore the technologies we may be using in the FoodTracker. I finished the simple login system using MySQL and Java servlets.

After meeting with the Nutritional Sciences team, I have a bit more direction regarding things to study and learn about. We discussed what features the app might have. Overall, it seems that we need to focus on clean and simple app presentation while processing nutritional information on the server side. We also discussed our target audience, which is young children and their families.

This week we will be meeting as a large group so that us (the Nutritional Team) can present the information that we have come up with thus far to our Computer Science Team. I'll be presenting what I wrote about in my last blog - different ways to present information to our audience. As a team (Dr. Hingle, Madison, and myself) have decided that the "go, slow, woah" method was our best option.

Although we did not meet last week, we have been continuing to work on our app research and putting together what our ideal mobile health app will look like.

On Tuesday, Chelsea, Melanie and I met to review our research thus far and really dive into what key features we can and cannot live without. Based on this information we will be presenting our ideas to the Computer Science team on Friday at our monthly meeting.

This week, I created a UML sequence diagram of the current login system, so that it can easily be explained to others without reading the source code. The diagram is located here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oss1ur4kqep7rel/AndroidFoodTracker.png

This week was spent connecting the technologies in a small demo. We tested an HTTP Post to a servlet running on our University servers. Although there is still an issue with the firewalls, everything should fall in to place once they are resolved. The demo involves a simple login system, which served to familiarize me with the servlet and database technology, and may even be extended to be used in our application.

This week I really got down to business. First, after deciding how much we liked the way the application Fooducate rated their food I was assigned to look further into the exact methods and criteria used to grade food. They used four categories: nutrients, ingredients, category of the food item, and processing. All of which mainly focused around the idea encouraged nutrients, natural ingredients, and minimal processing were key to making a healthy food in the eyes of Fooducate.

After we met last week, our goal for this week was to really dive into what we want this app to look like. How will we make it user friendly? Who will be using it and how will we help them to meet their health goals, etc.

My specific focus point was user experience while Chelsea is focusing on content validation. For user experience we want to keep in mind the preferences of diverse user groups, overall user goals and activities, and also user motivation including beliefs and practices. With all of that said, I set out to answer a few questions about our dream app....

This week we continued to explore available technologies to be used in building server/client phone applications. I read a paper relating to design patterns in server/client architectures that can lead to increased usability from the user perspective.

We are beginning the Foodtracker project by exploring some of the technologies that may be useful for our application. This week, we focused on Java servlets and connecting them to a MySQL database to store user information. We are running these servlets using Apache Tomcat.