Problems of current system:
After reviewing several nutrition systems, we summarized three main deficiencies among these systems.
Inefficient food entry
One common problem of there system is inefficient food entry. Usually it should take three to five clicks to finish a food entry, sometime even more. Some interface is not user friendly, which make user more confuse when enter the food. So it’s really time-consuming to enter all the data after a meal. It will somehow discourage the positivity of user to make data entry, which will affect the output of the system in the long run.
Limited database
An another problem of these systems is limited database, especially on food selection. For most current systems, the database of food only consist general food. If the user eats some special diet that is not on the list, then it would be different to track the nutrition intake sometimes. Besides that, they don’t provide the menu of popular restaurants. For most business man, they are likely having meal outside, which leading to be not so efficient to record the dishes.
Without server support
Nearly all the processes of systems that we studied are operated on client side, which required device with vital computing power and storage space. Unfortunately most PDA’ CPU is around 200Hz to 300Hz throughout the market. Therefore reserving large calculation and database on the PDA may slow down the operation. That is why our proposed system is designed as server-client architecture. We only keep some general database and simple calculation on client side. The server side will execute most tasks like large graph presentation, calculation, or query. From another point of view, our system can be considered as just an input device.
No notification support
The third problem is that most nutrition software can not provide notification for user under some situation. Take a person with heart disease as an example. When he wants to order a dish at a restaurant that is not good for his health, at this moment the system will warn him to choose another one or give him some suggestion. Or when he is confusing which dish is better, system will compare the nutrition fact of the dishes so as to make a recommendation for user. As we know that people with heart disease have to take pill regularly, therefore our proposed system have the function that alert user to take pill after he set up the schedule on the system.
Sean