Improve health and wellness

BACKGROUND

Our client was struggling with Excel sheets in the age of mobile apps

The client was a successful nutritionist and fitness trainer who owned fitness startups in the U.S as well as France. He was using excel spreadsheets to come up with meal plans that aligned with the fitness goals of his customers. Because that required extensive manual work and computation, he was looking for a technology partner that could develop an application for generating meal plans automatically based on fitness goals and the dietary preferences of the customer.

CHALLENGE

Developing an intelligent fitness and wellness app with customized diets

• Generate meal plans factoring in the height, weight, age, fitness goals and dietary needs of the customers.
• Allow exclusion of certain foods such as meat, fish or any other food specified by the user. Allow for the possibility that users could be vegetarian, vegan, allergic to some food, or simply dislike a food.
• Generate meal plans in metric as well as imperial systems (ml and fl.oz, kg and lbs., etc.) to accommodate the needs of both European and American users.
• Calculate and recommend food intake quantities keeping in mind the calories of macronutrients (carbohydrates, fat and protein) and required daily amount of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals).
• Recommend a minimum of 8 different meal combinations per meal.
• Generate complete meal plans as a PDF file in 2 different languages (English and French) using customer inputs, pre-defined metrics and formulae.

SOLUTION

UI-focused app with meal combo options for American and European audience

• We started the engagement with a requirement gathering/discovery phase. As part of this phase, we built detailed wireframes and a working prototype. We also shortlisted all the tools/frameworks that we intended to use for the application.
• Upon receiving a signoff on the discovery document, the graphic designer developed UI designs for this project, and the UI developer used Angular Material UI to develop the front end.
• We came up with special algorithms to generate meal plans to match the user’s dietary preferences while also accommodating the macro and micro nutrient needs that enabled the customer to reach their fitness goals.
• To overcome the challenges while generating the meal plan report as a PDF file (with static and dynamic text), we used the templating engine Thymeleaf that created HTML views of images and text. We then used iTextPdf to convert the final HTML content into PDF.
• We wrote migration scripts to bulk import existing user data from csv files onto the meal planner application database so that existing users could directly start using the meal planner application once the site was live.

TESTIMONIAL

User-friendly software

Kamel Moulai-Souiga
Founder & CEO, Nutreetion Health, Wellness and Fitness

IMPACT

Expert algorithm generates customized meal plans for every customer's need in 15 minutes

In the client’s own words, the time frame to generate a meal plan based on their fitness needs and dietary restrictions was reduced from 10-15 hours of manual work to about 10-15 minutes when using the application that we developed.

The application eliminated the need for fitness trainers to go through a tedious and error prone manual process in order to come up with meal plans for their customers. Upon launch of this application, trainers didn’t need to manually come up with meal plans and quantities that matched the protein, carb and fat intake needs of their customers. The software now did this for them, automatically.

• Meal plans matching height, weight, age, fitness goals and dietary needs of customer
• Allows exclusion of certain foods such as meat, fish and foods causing allergy, and accommodates special diets such as Vegan and Vegetarian
• Algorithm to recommend food intake quantities keeping macro and micro nutrient intake needs in mind
• Generate complete meal plans as a PDF file in 2 different languages (English and French)