2. NutriDevil

Full-Stack, Cross-platform, App Development Project.

Over this winter break, I am building a meal planning app for Duke University students. It’s not fully done yet, but I’ll update this site as I go. Here’s what I have so far:

Features I Want to Implement:

1. Preliminary Survey

Upon launching app, user takes a preliminary survey to get information on their weight/height/sex information, dietary goals, dietary restrictions, motivation levels, activity levels, how much variety they enjoy in their meals throughout the week, etc.

→ Based on their responses, app will recommend them a meal plan for the week using the nutritional information of the food/restaurants available on campus

→→ Duke has a service called “Net Nutrition” which holds the dietary information of every meal for every restaurant on campus

2. Should be Budget-Conscious

→ We use a system called “food points” to purchase food on campus. How many food points a student starts off with is based on the meal plan they selected. My app should be able to hold students to a daily budget that will maximize their nutritional goals, while keeping the amount of food points they have in mind.

3. Should be Flexible

The app will create a recommended meal plan, but students should be free to change/exchange any item.

4. Progress Tracker

Users should be able to check-off whether or not they followed through with a particular meal in the day (breakfast, lunch, dinner), which will then be used to track their progress in meeting their dietary/weight/health goals set previously.

→ Users should receive notifications at the end of the day (or end of every meal period?) asking them to check off their completed meals

5. Incentives to keep coming back to the app?

→ Perhaps a Blue Devil character that serves as the app mascot/gets nurtured whenever the user completes a day → would require animations

→ Perhaps a point system that increases whenever a student checks in

6. For the Future: Mood-based Recommendations

I was thinking of implementing a mood-based recommender later on. Perhaps the app could prompt students to rate how they’re feeling once a day, and if a student is feeling down one day, our recommender could factor in a surprise treat in that student’s meal plan for that day.