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Helping Children Eat Well via Mobile Software Technologies

Published: 21 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes an Android mobile app we developed to simplify the shopping experience of participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides low-income families vouchers to purchase life-stage appropriate, nutritious foods. Our app helps alleviate the tedious and error-prone use of paper WIC vouchers by allowing participants to scan food items in the store and automatically identify if an item (including its size and quantity) is authorized for the enrolled WIC participant. In addition to serving as a shopping tool, the app also provides a platform for nutrition education through healthy tip push notifications and a gallery of easy-to-fix snack recipes that are tailored for WIC participant shopping choices and other racial/ethnic patterns in dietary preferences. This paper explains the key domain and technical challenges we faced when creating our Android app and describes how we overcame these challenges by applying data normalization, software patterns, and Agile development methods.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Functionality and User Review Analysis of Mobile Apps for Mindfulness Eating and Eating DisordersProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661521(1350-1371)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Smartphone Apps for Food Purchase Choices: A Scoping Review of Designs and Opportunities and Challenges (Preprint)Journal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/45904Online publication date: 14-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Understanding Food Planning Strategies of Food Insecure Populations: Implications for Food-Agentic TechnologiesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581568(1-22)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
MobileDeLi '14: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Mobile Development Lifecycle
October 2014
50 pages
ISBN:9781450321907
DOI:10.1145/2688412
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 21 October 2014

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Author Tags

  1. agile
  2. android
  3. data analysis
  4. data normalization
  5. mobile app
  6. open mHealth
  7. software design patterns

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Overall Acceptance Rate 6 of 8 submissions, 75%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Functionality and User Review Analysis of Mobile Apps for Mindfulness Eating and Eating DisordersProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661521(1350-1371)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Smartphone Apps for Food Purchase Choices: A Scoping Review of Designs and Opportunities and Challenges (Preprint)Journal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/45904Online publication date: 14-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Understanding Food Planning Strategies of Food Insecure Populations: Implications for Food-Agentic TechnologiesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581568(1-22)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2017)A Smartphone App for Families With Preschool-Aged Children in a Public Nutrition Program: Prototype Development and Beta-TestingJMIR mHealth and uHealth10.2196/mhealth.74775:8(e102)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2017
  • (2016)What's for Lunch?Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems10.1145/2901790.2901793(1160-1171)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2016

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