Proposal of Group 7

Because in week 2 and week 3, all of our group members are fully engaged in the preparation for the lecture, we have just discussed our group proposal. The expectation of the final product, requirement of software, and our two week look ahead sheet are listed below.

1.     Background of our project

Many college students lead an unhealthy life nowadays. They stay up late in the night, don’t have breakfast, pay little attention to the components of diet, and seldom take exercise.

This kind of unhealthy habit has tremendous adverse effects on the quality of life of students, especially on the efficiency and effective of study. However, as they don’t collect data about their daily life, usually they have no sense of how serious it is to lead an unhealthy life. Moreover, many of us are troubled by the proper selection of what to eat every day. In order to get more nutrition and at the same time keep fat relatively low, we need some help from a software for basic calorie calculations.

If we can select what to eat according to the properties of different food, then we may become more reasonable in choosing our diet. Moreover, if a proper amount of exercise is recommended by a user-friendly software and the benefit of exercising is visualized, we have more possibility to go our for exercise and become healthier.

2.     Expectation of our final product

We will make a user interface (a small software) to make suggestions on the daily life of the user, especially college students. Its function can be divided into the following parts:

1)     After the user input his/her choice of meal, calculate the nutrients content and calorie content of it. Then show the recommended level of each index. If a certain index is out of range, then an alarm will be presented.

2)     Make suggestions about exercise everyday according to the information stored in the database. After the user makes a choice, record it in the database.

3)     Keep record of the meal information and exercise information of the user. Use statistics to visualize the result and predict the trend of development. We may use his picture and make some modification on its size to indicate the serious result if he has made some bad choice of meals or doesn’t do enough amount of exercise.

3.     Basic software learning and using requirements

We need the following software according to the function we want to have:

1)     Use a database management system such as Access or MySQL to store the basic information of our product.

2)     Use VB or Java to design the interface of the software and build a link between the interface and the database management system.

3)     Use Mathematica to plot the curves needed and do some calculation.

4.     Look ahead sheet for the next week