Development of a food to calorie converter mobile application: a case study of Nigerian foods

Abstract

Computer-assisted methods for analyzing food consumption is becoming a major subject among Nigerians. This is a result of the rapidly growing number of smartphone owners in the country. Although app developers have risen to the challenge of creating weight management software, they do not address local Nigerian foods.In this work, we present a Food to Calorie Converter (F2CC) for smartphones, to quantify the energy consumption from Nigerian staple foods. We also explore the availability and suitability of current mobile applications which are available from Android application stores, iPhone Application shops, Nokia OVI stores and other sources in order to justify the need for a mobile application which provides nutritional data for Nigerian recipes while computing the net calorie consumed based on user’s record input. Our methodology includes an android application with an inbuilt SQLite database for storing the food data. The system has an Android Model-Controller-View (MVC) Architecture and was developed using Eclispe IDE. The Application software can work in any Android IOS with less than 5MB memory requirements for storing a plurality of staple food data. The application includes a calorie retrieval module, BMI and BMR calculators as well as a display of food Consumption history.

Keywords: Android, Calorie, SQLite, Eclipse, Nigerian Food