Sugar Ray Leonard

Background and Demographic Information

• Nickname: Sugar Ray Leonard
• Demographics: Individuals with a health condition that requires a certain diet
• Overheard quote: "It's extremely difficult to eat when I want without doing tedious nutritional calculations."

Narrative

Sugar's chronic diabetes affects him on a daily basis. While his friends seem to enjoy food at their every whim, Sugar has to take extreme precautions and carefully plan out every meal. Going out for dinner or having snacks at a friendly get-together is almost an impossibility. Sugar strongly wishes for a simply solution to allow him relax but also meet his dietary requirements.

Behavioral and Dimensional Information

• Goals and Motivations:
  Sugar's primary goal is to not let his chronic condition impair his ability to enjoy himself. He wants an easy way to accurately track what he eats, so he can eat when he wants.
• Tasks:
  Currently, in order to enjoy himself, Sugar has to carefully plan his consumption around events he would like to attend. He has to track intake so far, ensure he doesn't exceed intake during events, and accurately take insulin supplements accordingly. He finds the calorie tracking and insulin conversion process all-consuming.
• Pain Points, Concerns, and Challenges:
  Sugar is worried about accuracy, because the smallest nutrient miscount could have devastasting health consequences. He also cares about ease of use, because one of his main concerns is making nutrient tracking a less tedious process.
• User Flow
  • Sugar has a party tonight
  • He has tracked his calorie and sugar intake througout the day with the app, so he know exactly how much food he can have at the event
  • He goes to the event and sees a delicious cake
  • He takes a discrete picture and quickly determines that it fits within his nutrient limits
  • He eats the cake and his daily nutrient allowance is accordingly adjusted

• Find food image database with calorie/nutrient information
• If not available, develop database from our own pictures and nutrient measurements

Meathead Mac

Background and Demographic Information

• Nickname: Meathead Mac - your friendly neighborhood gym bro
• Demographics: Hardcore gym-goer. Measures everything he eats. His body is his temple. Mid twenties to earlier thirties. Hyper-concerned with protein intake, less focused on other facets of nutrition.
• Overheard quote: "Every second I spend counting grams of protein is a second I could be hitting curls for the girls and tris for the guys!"

Narrative

Meathead Mac logs every single gram of food he eats in MyFitnessPal. He brings his food scale to buffets and sneaks tupperware into movie theaters. Mac's biggest fear is being small.

Mac is often heard complaining about how tedious and time-consuming it is to ensure he is hitting his macros each day, but continues to measure since his second biggest fear is not hitting his protein goal for the day. Meathead Mac is desparate for a convenient and fast way to make sure that he is, in his words, 'getting them gains boy!'

Behavioral and Dimensional Information

• Goals and Motivations:
  • Gain muscle while staying lean-ish
  • Ensure hitting calorie and macro goals
  • Save time on food logging
• Tasks:
  • Track calories
  • Track macros (especially protein)
  • Keep running daily count of macros and calories
  • Monitor food intake as quickly as possible
• Pain Points, Concerns, and Challenges:
  • Is not the most tech savvy
  • Concerned process will take too long
  • Doesn't want to be bothered with food recommendations
  • Wants to click as few buttons as possible
  • Worried that protein estimates will be wrong
• User Flow
  • Open up app
  • Take a picture of food
  • View macro contents of food
  • Check current daily protein intake
  • Ensure on track to hit goal for day
  • If short of goal, add more protein
  • Close app (as quickly as possible)

Visualizing the data for the user and giving them helpful information about their food

As Trader Joe Trent, I want to be able to discover new foods and ideas for meals.

This feature would allow users to upload the pictures that they take, as well as view the meals of others. This would act as a social media platform of sorts where users are able to interact with each other, find new foods, etc.

App should be able to authenticate, manage, and store user account information

As Meathead Mac, I want to be able to view my protein intake for the day and week.
As Sugar Ray Leonard, I want to be able to monitor my sugar intake throughout the day.
As Husky Henry, I want to be able to view my calorie averages throughout the week to ensure that, on average, I am not going over my limits.

This feature will allow the user to view their dietary intake which they have taken pictures of. The user should be able to view the dietary metrics, food types, and (maybe) pictures over a designated time period. The user should be able to control the time period (ie. day vs. week)

Work on classification and/or estimation CNN learning algorithm based on image database

• Use deep learning model to convert picture of food
• Iteratively improve accuracy

As a user, I want to be able to snap a picture of my food and have the app be able to recognize it. That way, I can easily track what foods I eat.

As Meathead Mac and Trader Joe Trent, I want the app to be really good at recognizing the foods that I eat the most with high accuracy.

This feature would allow the user to upload pictures and dietary metrics (macros, sugar, etc.) to the app. This information would then be included in the ML model to allow the model to skew in favor of the foods that the current user eats the most.

Need publicly accessible flask server to handle classification

Insert images and corresponding calorie information in database

Trader Joe Trent

Background and Demographic Information

• Nickname: Trader Joe Trent
• Demographics: 25 years old, casual fitness participant, amateur foodie
• Overheard quote: "Broseph the waiter won't tell me the nutrional facts."

Narrative

Trader Joe Trent is a casual fitness individual who embraces certain aspects of healthy living. He sometimes goes to the gym and does typically simple running. He also buys products labeled organic and niche health food items sold at Trade Joe and Whole Foods. On the days he wants to be healthy, he's frustrated at how hard it is to tabulate the calories and macronutrients in his take-out from his neighborhood cafe Aioli. Sometimes he sees a delicious ready-made meal at Whole Foods but unfortunately, he doesn't know what's in it and passes.

Behavioral and Dimensional Information

• Goals and Motivations:
  • occasionally find out the nutritional component
  • wants to understand what is in his bowl from the cafe
  • learn new recipes/teasing out foods from his favorite restaurants
  • see what other healthy people are eating
• Tasks:
  • would need to ask the waiter or staff for a nutritional breakdown (often difficult in a restaurant or a mom and pop store)
  • writes down different recipes he found online, never close to what he eats in the restaurants (ingredients-wise)
  • talks to his friends about their diet and write down different meal ideas
• Pain Points, Concerns, and Challenges:
  • getting the nutritional information
  • limited circle of friends so meal inspiration is low
• User Flow
  1. sees prepared food at Whole Foods or at the cafe
  2. interested in making it at home, but no staff is around
  3. takes picture of the food
  4. finds a list of foods in it
  5. closes the app and buys the food

Receive database access
Download image and data files

Husky Henry

Background and Demographic Information

• Nickname: Husky Henry
• Demographics: People who are focused on weight loss (and more specifically, fat loss -- so not bodybuilders trying to cut)
• Overheard quote: "I'm trying to lose weight, but it's so hard to stay on top of my diet... I just don't have the time/energy to keep track of what I'm eating"

Narrative

Short narrative or description about the user and why they're using your product/service (try to capture their attitudes, needs, problems/concerns, and experience)

Husky Henry is trying to lose weight and lead a healthier lifestyle. Actually doing it is hard, and it's not because of laziness. Henry has a job, hobbies, and other responsibilities, and it can be hard to track everything he eats and make sure he's on top of his dietary goals. He has tried playing around with various apps like MyFitnessPal, maybe tried losing weight with a buddy for accountability, but in the end, he goes to a few restaurants, has a few late nights at the office, and finally caves on his diet, before starting the whole cycle again.

Behavioral and Dimensional Information

• Goals and Motivations:
  • Lose weight
• Tasks:
  • Tool that would make tracking calorie consumption (and other tangential metrics, like fat or sugar intake) easy
  • Tool that would make diet planning easy
  • Maybe a platform that would make dieting more bearable; perhaps tips on dealing with hunger, healthy meal recipes, or a community forum for accountability and peer support
• Pain Points, Concerns, and Challenges:
  • Dieting is difficult. It's easy to eat out, snack, etc., and hard to count calories, cook healthy meals at home, etc.
  • Tracking food intake in particular is very hard; people are busy, get their food from different places (where they can't measure out their nutrition or know exactly what they're putting in their body). It can be exhausting to stay on top of things even if you're motivated
• User Flow
  • Enter app
  • Open camera and snap a picture of food
  • Maybe follow a quick prompt to help the AI (like outlining the food in the picture)
  • Perhaps receive notifications when you are nearing your dietary thresholds during the day
  • Also have a personal dashboard that displays the information important to you (calories, sugar, fat/trans fats)

• Authenticate, manage, and store user account information

As all users, I want to be able to access this as conveniently as possible.

Packaging this into an app would allow convenient home screen access as opposed to visiting a mobile site. It would be cool to have this app downloadable from the app store.

end results: user screens that allow them to easily navigate the app