NutriSphere - Health and Fitness Simplified

NutriSphere logo!
A look at the axure workspace our team used for the hackathon!

What inspired you?

We came up with the idea to create an application to manage nutrition and meals because we have often heard from friends and family that they have trouble eating healthy and staying hydrated because it was difficult to maintain a set plan for themselves. They also didn't have the time nor the resources to make healthy meals themselves. After doing a bit of research, we found that creating meal plans is an efficient way to track food consummation. We thought that if we created a phone application incorporating ways to easily and confidently create and manage meal plans, as well as inspire users to make their own healthy meals with a database of homemade recipes, people would be able to eat healthier, easier.

How did you build your project?

We built our project using Axure in order to optimize user interface and cleanliness. We started with the homepage and gradually came up with new features to implement, most of which we were able to add to the interface, such as a progress bar, a daily overview at a glance, and a homemade recipe book. We selected the color scheme and design elements to create a minimalistic yet purposeful look. We researched common meals and nutrients to add to our database and to ensure an accurate demonstration. Since Axure is mostly a front-end app designer, the "back-end" consisted of the conditional logic and global variables and statements implemented to make the Sphere system work. We also created a website from scratch in order to advertise our project and reach our target audience.

Which challenges did you face?

The most challenging part of the process of creating this application was figuring out the functions of Axure and to what extent we could implement these functions into our application. It was also notably difficult to accomplish our avid goals in only a period of 48 hours. We were forced to pick the most important and useful features to implement into our application, despite each team member having a range of other excellent ideas. However, we would love to add more of these ideas and improve our app's functionality in the future.

What did you learn?

During PeddieHacks 2022, our team learned a lot about coding an application to encourage a healthy lifestyle. We learned about effective app design and had to think a lot about our target audience (teens and older) and in which ways we could design the application to not only appeal to but also inspire and motivate users to continue using the app. Besides learning about interface and app design, we also learned how to solve multiple logic issues with our code. Overall, during the course of this hackathon, we've developed useful core skills to apply further over the course of our academic careers, and had a lot of fun working on this project. :)