Assignment 1_WE CARE

 

Human-Computer Interaction

 

MyFitnessPal

What is MyFitnessPal?

MyFitnessPal is one of the most popular web-based fitness and exercise in social media applications.

It helps you keep way of your daily beverage intake and food and calculating all your calories, vitamins and nutrients. So, you can find out your diet in missing or where you need to cut back a little and it’s also blog is loaded with good recipes, tons and workouts of health and wellness tips. It’s also connects with more of the popular activity tracking devices and mobile apps like as the Lumo Liift4, the Polar Loop and the Fitbit. You can these devices track your steps, active time, burned calories and more.

MyFitnessPal is so popular and it’s totally free for everyone no need any “fee trial” or bait-and-switch premium editions. So, you can just put up wit a few ads and you’re good to go. It has barcode section you just scan the barcode than you know the food details. So, you might even enjoy it.

And one more thing MyFitnessPal have Facebook-like community section. There you can find and follow friends, share your workout and food diaries and you get motivation, accountability and inspiration for your quest. In my side it’s really helpful for me and it’s working to maintain my fitness. So, I things it’s very helpful and most popular web-based exercise and fitness social media applications.

For the app, MyFitnessPal, they used the following classification of method for the persuasive technology, which are:

Tunneling: Guiding user through some process step by step. When he enters this path, he is partially persuaded to progress. In this app, you have to key in the all the related data to what you eat regularly from breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks.

Reduction: Guiding user through some process step by step. When he enters this path, he is partially persuaded to progress. The app itself have a bar code scanner via you have the bar codes of any food which will let you know the calories, crabs, fat, protein.

Suggestion: Detecting the right conditions (e.g. time, place) to perform some action and suggesting to do it. In this app, it will suggest you what food you should take according to your data plan.

As for our chosen application, MY FITNESS PAL, from my point of view has kind of fulfilled the cognitive aspect. I am saying this because the sub topics of cognitive aspect which are attention, perceive and recall memory have been carefully handed by the developers themselves.

For the part of attention: This app involves with health and fitness. In this app, you can see that it has a diary in which it stores the items for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks too. It tells you to key in the foods that you consume.

And as for the website, it has good color combination of yellow, blue and white which attracts the attention of users like us. The text and the images of both app and website are clearly visible to the user.

Sadly, it does not involve audio sense but it does have visual senses like victory stories:

It focusses and divides attention that enables us to be selective in terms of the mass of competing stimuli but limits our ability to keep track of all events:

And as for the part of Perception: The app involves a built-in bar code scanner which tell the user the calories, cards, proteins, fats and the size of the serving of the food you scanned.

For the next part, Memory:  It uses the pictures more rather than the text which us to recall more about the website. We don’t remember everything - involves filtering and processing what is attended to. Context is important in affecting our memory. We recognize things much better than being able to recall things. We remember less about objects we have photographed than when we observe them with the naked eye. It uses the “7 ± 2” theory, which is interpreted to argue that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory. On the top of the website it has 8 menus which follow the “7 ± 2” theory.

When I first heard about the MyFitnessPal having the bar code scanner having the biggest food database (11+ million foods in our database including global items and cuisines. Barcode Scanner. Simply scan barcodes to log foods. 4+ million barcodes recognized). And it certainly lived up to its hype as whatever bar code I scanned for any food it showed me the calories, crabs, fat and protein of the scanned food. I was also thrilled to know that it learns how to make healthier choices about the foods you eat and I can automatically calculate the calories in my foods, meals and recipes. And also has Macro Tracker: it automatically calculates the macros (carbs, fat, protein) in your foods, meals and recipes. It tracks all nutrients: Calories, macros (carbs, fat, protein), sugar, fiber, cholesterol, vitamins, and more. It customizes your Diary: Log breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks or create your own meals. It has water tracking: Log water in cups, ounces or ml. It saves your recently logged amounts.  The only factor I did not like about it was the advertisement in the free mode. I understand that it has ads because it is free but the number of ads are way too much to handle.

The best way to change your eating habits and lose weight is to hold yourself accountable to the food you are eating. Tracking your food is the most effective way to do that. Without tracking it’s easy to think you are eating healthy – or within your means. However, if the scale is not budging or goes up then too much food is usually to blame. When you do not pay attention to the food you eat then most likely you are eating too much. That tracking food is tedious and takes too much time. Yes it will take time and some effort. To make changes to your eating habits you must pay attention and be intentional with your food. Tracking helps you do just that. Once you are comfortable with food portions and create a structure for yourself then you can ease up on the tracking a bit. However, if you are struggling with your eating habits then tracking your food can provide a nice frame work and structure to keep you focused.

To be honest, a habit is sort of nebulously defined. I think we can all agree that a habit is anything you do regularly, but according to the definition we use in psychology, a habit also needs to be done automatically — as in, without really thinking about it. Which is why identifying habits by yourself is so hard.

Which is probably why we missing this habit. And it’s exactly why this habit is so important for fat loss.

You see, all habits need a trigger. Our environment is loaded with triggers for eating when we are not really hungry and for continuing to eat past the point of satiety. Learning to recognize these triggers and respond in an effective manner is the key to thriving in our food abundant environment.

What is trigger?

Think about the word trigger for a moment. In behavioral terms, a trigger is anything that serves as a stimulus that initiates a reaction or series of reactions. This concept is analogous to a mechanical trigger, defined as a mechanism that activates a sequence.

Thinking about a trigger in mechanical terms is helpful because it takes the emotion out of it for a moment. More importantly, it reminds us that a trigger has no effect on its own and must be activated in some way. When faced with one of your triggers, instead of automatically eating, use the following mindful eating concepts.

FOCUS: Whenever you want to eat or continue to eat, that is your trigger to pause and ask, Am I hungry? In essence, you are creating a new trigger for yourself. Wanting to eat now allowing you to respond instead of react.

Accept: don’t judge yourself, you would not judge a machine for having a switch. Instead say: Hmmm. That is really interesting.

Take action: Each time you choose not to pull the trigger, you weaken its connection. It’s as if the wires rust and eventually break. Further each time you choose a different action, you create new connection with practice, you will hardwire these new pathways-like insulating thewriting.

In our project we are working on mobile app which name is “my fitness pal”. But my personal opinion I think this app have some disadvantages. One of them is this app ask too much information from user. Which is very irritated sometime it’s very time consuming?

Another disadvantage is when someone install that app first time it’s says starts for free but when we log in the app there are too many features which are not free such as,

(i)               Nutrient Dashboard

(ii)             Food Analysis

(iii)            File Export

(iv)            Food Timestamps etc.

Another and last disadvantages of this app not that much user friendly. An example which people are not too much familiar with using apps for those people it’s very difficult to maintain that app.

(7). In my personal opinion, I don’t think so there is any ethical implication in this app. This is an app which use for personal health issue so there are no possibility for ethical implication.

My opinion about 2^nd question is yes. Because personally I think when someone starting use this app that will waste a lot of time because this app very difficult to maintain. To get the proper advantage of this app we need to update this everyday which is very time consuming.

This app has very strong privacy. This app has a option which is “Privacy Center”, inside Privacy Center there are other six option which are help someone to maintain their privacy while using this app.

This app doesn’t have any deception, manipulation, misrepresentation or other dishonest techniques Except when we scan any food items barcode by using this app scan feather it’s didn’t show exactly same food nutrition.

Yes, this app has some design which can harm user sometime. An example if someone try to lose their weight and if they use this apps then they have to maintain this app rules. For losing weight this app will give some instruction to user. An example this app provides a physical excise rule to user for losing weight and user try to fulfiller this rules sometime user going face difficulty to complete that instruction such as over physical excise which is not good for health.

Thus, we can conclude that this, MyFitnessPal, may have some shortcomings but still have the features to hold its promising outcomes which they told they can do and they made it possible.