As my mother's health has deteriorated, it became more and more important to monitor what she eats. With her diabetes, we have to be very careful with her carbohydrate intake and ensure that we bolus insulin accordingly. With her kidney disease, we have to be very careful about both sodium and fluid intake and watch those accordingly. Overall, we need to be able to track consumed meals and nutrients, plan future meals, and surface issues in current diet.
This is not a problem only for people with diabetes. As a result of trauma, using eating as a coping mechanism when I was a kid, and lack of knowledge, I became obese in my youth. A lot of dedicated effort in exercise and nutrition has helped, but I've also seen how losing track of what I eat can quickly make me gain weight and put me on the fast-track to pre-diabetes. I want to be able to effectively log, plan, and analyze my meals to maximize my workout effectiveness.
I want a system that makes it easy to record meals and analyze this data. Now, it's true, I can easily use pen & paper. I can keep a meal diary in a notebook and then copy it to a computer for durability. This has all the usual obvious problems: what happens if an page gets spilled on or torn out? What if my handwriting is bad? What if I run out of space? How do I share it simply with her doctors? How can I see the underlying trends in the data?
I could easily use a spreadsheet. That's suggested to be the "lowest effort" electronic solution. It solves digital durability, clarity, is conceptually more difficult to run out of space and easier to share.
But it still involves tedious, manual work. I have to write down the meals, copy them down into a spreadsheet. If I want to make a graph, I have to learn Excel's charting tools. I could do fancy manipulations with Pivot Tables, etc...
But what I really want is a way for all of this to be done for me. I don't want to have to type out the contents of my meals, look up their nutritional information and copy down the numbers, and then analyze them later. In my ideal world, my phone can automatically add meals to my meal log in "one click." That log is automatically shared with family and trusted contacts like doctors. The log has machine learning applied to find patterns and surface correlations/offer tentative causality hypotheses. The auto-collection of data prevents me from making silly mistakes and can integrate with other systems that take actions based on the readings. I want to be able to visualize my meals over a week, a month, a year, and track my caloric intake, my protein/carb/fat intake, my sodium intake, my vitamin intake, etc. I want to be able to correlate specific events, like hospitalization or illness, with changes in median levels. Speaking of medians, I want to be able to simply calculate summary statistics.
From information, we can achieve freedom. So let's build a system that makes it simple to gather this information and easy to use it to improve someone's health.