An Implementation of Interactive Healthy Eating Index and Healthcare System on Mobile Platform for College Students

Background: This research aims to conduct those college students who have not yet left their family before. At this phrase, students tend to form erroneous diet habits. These situations will lead to obesity and chronic diseases. The purpose of this research is to develop and design the smart Healthcare System for college students. Therefore, we hope to utilize the technology of information to make college students understand their dietary and whether they have enough physical activity or not. Objective: The objectives of this study is to develop an application. This application provide students a method to understand their habits both on the diet and the exercise. An interactive healthy diet evaluation and healthcare system is established in this research. With the convenience of mobile phones, the users can easily record the dietary contents, nutrient, and exercise process. According to the past dietary habits and exercise records, it also provides suggestions of nutrient allowance. The system, containing diet module and exercise module, can automatically offer suggestions according to the users’ basic information, including age, gender, favorite types of food, and amount of exercise. Students can inspect the nutrients they take to adjust their dietary and exercising habit. This can avoid the obesity which caused by the unbalanced long-term diet and the chronic diseases which might happen in the future. Methods: The mobile device application is applied at the system interface, the graphic interface, diagrams and images can effectively provide the users with various diets and exercise information. The users can use their own mobile devices whenever and wherever they need. They are not limited by the time and the space. Meanwhile, the system could record the amount of exercise by integrating with Google Map and rapidly inquire the past exercise records for the reference of self-inspection. In this research, we invite 80 students to conduct this experiment. We divide this experiment into two periods. For the first four weeks, students have to use hard paper to record the diet and exercise information. Students have to record at least three days within a week. We require two weekdays and one weekend and then we can assume the nutrients they have taken in a week. For the rest four weeks, every step is the same but the only difference is that students need to access the application of the mobile phones. Results: The diet module analysis system will give proper suggestions and calculate the required nutrients for users, so that the users can change their dietary habits. Moreover, the system will recommend the users suitable types of food in the criteria. It will automatically remind the users of excessive or insufficient nutrient so as to give the users a way to select a suitable food for individuals and not to cause the body overwhelmed by the unbalanced nutrients. The exercise module will analyze the dietary records, suggesting appropriate running distance for proper exercise, and store the running data and distance records into the database. We invite 80 college students to conduct in this experiment. We can view the success rate via recording the three meals on the mobile phones. 60 students can fulfill the record of breakfast, which is 75 percent; 72 students can fulfill the record of lunch, which is 90 percent; 74 students can fulfill the record of dinner, which is 75.4 percent; as for the other snacks, 56 students can fulfill it, which is 70 percent. Compared with the first stage of recording on the hard paper, we have inspected that the success rate of lunch and dinner achieve 70 percent and even more. Conclusions: This system can store exercise data by integrating with Google Map and rapidly inquire the past exercise records for the reference of self-inspection. In this case, the users can understand whether the diet and exercise conform to the healthy demands of daily health records and further learn to select suitable food and improve the exercise habits. College students can bring the application conveniently and record the nutrients they take. This indeed can change the situation and the willingness. New generation needs to have a new tool and method to help them form good habits of dietary and exercise.