Description as a Tweet:

My(Non-Toxic)FitnessPal is a wellness application that de-emphasizes calories in tracking nutrition, fitness, and wellbeing.

Inspiration:

The initial inspiration for this app came from a loved one struggling to find applications for tracking food that would allow her to investigate potential intolerances without triggering her eating disorder, though this app is much more broadly applicable. The reality is that we live in a world where disordered eating is encouraged, promoted, and packaged as “health,” and the obsession we have with calories is harming all of us. At the same time, it can be useful to track the food we’re eating, the movement we’re doing, and the habits we’re engaging in to understand how to feel better, emotionally and physically. The main goal of this app is to allow users to become aware of how the food they eat and the actions they take impact the way the feel, day to day and over time. It presents health and wellness as not just an amount of calories or a number on a scale, but as the positive feelings we experience as a result of taking care of ourselves.

What it does:

This project allows users to search and add the food they eat and select the activities they engage in during their day as well as any symptoms or feelings they experience. Tracking this information allows them to be better aware of overall trends in their health and wellbeing and potential relationships between foods, behaviors and feelings.

How we built it:

For this hackathon, we focused on building a front-end prototype with HTML/CSS and Javascript of the main tracking page an individual user would encounter in the app on a desktop computer or mobile internet browser. We put together a simple HTML page, used CSS to style it, and added Javascript for interactive functionality of the search bar, food list, and activity and feeling selections, including arrays of data we would eventually pull from a back end, but for now included in the front-end code.

Technologies we used:

HTML/CSS
Javascript

Challenges we ran into:

We struggled adjusting to git, learning to incorporate JavaScript into HTML/CSS, and connecting the front end and back end to turn our front-end demo into the beginnings of a full stack application.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

We are proud to have a successfully interactive webpage, especially of the ability to search and add foods from the search bar.

What we've learned:

We learned a great deal from this project. We gained competency on the command line and with git, we learned about using event listeners in JavaScript, and though we did not get the back end working today, we learned a lot about how we would go about making it work in the future.

What's next:

1. Build out the application’s backend including a proper food database and user data management
2. Create page to display food items’ nutrition summaries
3. Include an autofill search model
4. Develop smartphone app based on website prototype
5. Include customization options to allow users to insert new foods, track new habits, symptoms, and feelings, and toggle visibility of certain nutritional categories
6. Introduce visualization and summarization tools to see habits tracked across time for each user as well as relationships between these habits
7. Develop statistical models to interpret relationships between tracked values and provide insights to user about potential connections

Built with:

We built this app on Mac laptops and used github for version control and collaboration.

My(Non-Toxic)FitnessPal