What Are We Eating?
From my many conversations with health experts, two problems stood out to me. They are, health experts are continuously surprised by what their patients do not know and secondly, it is not uncommon to have patients with food literacy unable to manifest food practices that align with what they know.
While these problems are summarised in just one sentence, within them are webs of subproblems that gives each problem much complexity.
The product I propose is an family-oriented app that focuses on ameliorating the two problems above. I decided to focus on specific subproblems. They are, the difficulties people have in understanding the particular jargon of food science and nutrition, and the role of money and time in reconciling food literacy with food practices.
Signing up: Users can sign up alone or as a family.
Users are encouraged to take photos of what they eat. This feature is connected to a food composition software that identifies what you eat by the five main food groups: vegetable, fruit, grain, dairy and protein, this data will be visually communicated on a simple bar graph. This is a time-saving way of recording a food journal.
Users are able to adjust the calendar setting in order to see their food composition data for the day, week, month or even year. Clicking on any of the bars will give them information of the food group it represents, including what it is, where it is from and why it is important for your health. It is written in simple, everyday language.
It is also possible to see how the family is doing. Each bar will give information on the family and if they have meet the recommended serving size for the food group it represents.
The following step is to make a shopping list. Under each food group is a list of food items that can be found in any large supermarket in New Zealand. A name as well as a picture accompany each food item; not only will this improve food literacy by increasing semantic knowledge of food items but it may also allow users to bypass the need to ask for assistance while shopping, thereby avoiding potential feelings of embarrassment for not knowing. In addition, I hope it would open up new varieties and possibilities of food in a way that would encourage users to deviate from their usual food trajectory to try something new.
The next feature of the app generates the best supermarket for the shopping list they have just created.
Each week the people of New Zealand receive catalogues from the biggest supermarkets; Countdown, New World and Pak n' Save. They may arrive in the form of email subscriptions, flyers in the supermarket, catalogues in their actual mailbox, or 200+ pages of specials on website of the supermarket. This apps complies weekly catalogues from each supermarket. When you enter your shopping list, the supermarket with the best specials for your items for that week will be generated. This saves money as well as the time of the person in charge of shopping in a food insecure household.