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3. The Product
Our product, “The Household Health Management Platform” (or “HHM”) is a system that the user can use on mobile devices and desktops. It is composed of three parts- “My nutritionist”,
“Diet Planner”, “I Grocery”, and “Result Analyzer.” Ranging from acquiring nutrition knowledge, designing diet plan, implementation, and result analyzing, these four software functions combine the whole process of diet management for all purpose. The following are descriptions in detail respectively.
3.1. “My nutritionist.”
It is just like interacting with a nutritionist. The users first input their basic health data, for instance age, gender, weight, height, alone with the objective he or she wish to achieve in a certain period of time. Based on this information, the software will search the build-in nutrition database that is announced by Department of Health as a guideline for generating a suitable diet plan. It will identify the nutrition requirements on each day and a food items recommendation list.
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Figure 3: The diet guidance announced by Department of Health
3.2. “ Diet Planner”
After identifying the daily nutrition targets and food items, the user can then make a schedule of his or her diet plan. “Diet planner” has a layout that looks like a schedule book. It will help users to plan daily meals according to the diet plan from “My nutritionist.” For instance, if the plan is to take 3 portions of vegetable a day, which means 21 portions a week. “Diet planer” will list out all the vegetables available in the season for you to choose. You can quickly pick some of those and then you are done with the vegetables purchasing list. For meat, eggs, fruits, and all the others things, the idea is the same. After you are done with all different categories, you can then decide the combination of every meal on each day. The nutrition data of daily meals will be showed at the same time.
Multiple users in a family
Unlike other Apps that can only process one user at a time, this family oriented software is designed to process all family members at the same time. As the user inputs data of all family members, the system will identify customized diet plans for each family member. And will use the integrated nutrition requirement as the guidance for meal planning.
Avoid harmful foods in an easy way
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This software is also convenient for people suffering from allergy and diabetes to avoiding taking forbidden food. As long as users input the list of items they wish to avoid, the “Diet planner” would never show them those items in the recommendation list. Having the
avoidance list of every family member built in, the shoppers of the week, no matter who that person is, will never buy the wrong thing again.
Generate purchasing list
Once the weekly diet is decided, the system will identify the materials needed and generate the purchasing list. Now purchasing food is not a routine job anymore. All the purchasing has a reason behind.
Customized Purchase Recommendation
The system would keep record and conduct data mining on user’s purchasing behavior. After accumulating user’s buying record to a certain degree, the system will be able to make customized recommendation. This would save user’s time. The time spend on weekly shopping is expected to be shorter and shorter. To a certain point, system can generate customized weekly shopping list for each user family.
Works like a schedule book
“Diet planner” works just like a schedule book where you can mark any of your important family events. (And such events are usually related to food, for instance, turkey and thanksgiving.) No more worries about forgetting anyone’s birthday, because the system reminds you one week ahead while you are making grocery shopping.
3.3. “ I Grocery”
It is an open ecommerce platform where users can access to multiple food and grocery sellers.
The key word search can quickly match user’s purchasing list to offerings across different sellers. And rank the result accordingly. Users are able to find out which of the offerings is
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closest to their needs, at the best price and with most convenient delivery policy.
For customers, this platform “I Grocery” provides more flexibility. Life cycle and health status of everyone changes overtime. People have different needs accordingly. In “I Grocery”, we have organic food sellers to satisfy main dishes on table, Chinese herb sellers to satisfy related diet requirements. In addition to that, we have ready-made Chinese medicine soup providers online, if customers are too busy to make those soups at home. To be short, the idea is to link everything customers might need to the same place, making it easy for customers to find solutions for diet plan.
3.4. Result Analyzer
There are set of analyzing tools in the “Result Analyzer” where once the user regularly record the key body measurement he/she is watching, it will plot out tables and charts to show the changes of that measurement at a diet time period.
3.5. Nutrition Module
The nutrition management knowledge behind “My nutritionist” is designed to be open-sourced. The following is a user scenario to illustrate how it works. Let’s say one Chinese doctor publishes a health book describing 9 kinds of patients and specific treatments for each of them under his theory. A reader, after reading his book, identified some of her family members fall into three categories. Assume this doctor is willing to authorize us digitalize the content and make 9 nutrition models. We will then release them on the App store. The reader can download the three models she needs. Having “My nutritionist”
installed in advance, once she activates those nutrition module to the corresponding family member’s sub account, “My nutritionist” will make a diet plan accordingly. In addition to that, if the nutrition modules downloaded include recipes, they will be shown on the system as well.
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It is open source in a sense that any medical doctor or nutritionist can authorize us to digitalize their theory. And by adapting such mechanism, “My Nutritionist” is able to make diet plans for all purpose. The benefit for users is that they can carry out different nutrition methods on the same platform, analyze effects in the same way, and view the result in the same layout. For individual users, it helps to fairly compare across different methods and thus can identify the most effective one. For households, it can carry diet plans for multiple family members of different unique objective at the same time on the same platform. It’s convenient and saves a lot of time. This is a feature that individual based diet Apps cannot offer, which will be further elaborated the chapter of competitor analysis.
This is a web-based service. All the functionalities are developed on the website. No matter what device is used, either smart phones, tablet, desktop, or even Smart TV, users are simply accessing to different interfaces of the system. Since all the user data is stored on the
website’s database, there are no synchronizing issues. Whenever a user accesses to our software, the data is always the most updated.