Maggie Ding¹ and Yu Sun², ¹USA, ²California State Polytechnic University, USA

In China almost 96 million children live in rural areas. Some of these children suffer from malnutrition since parents or guardians do not have knowledge of nutritional plans or how to calculate nutritional values. However, most of the Chinese population has access to a mobile device. This paper proposes a mobile application, which runs on the IOS and Android platforms, to calculate nutritional values and recommend a nutritional menu. EZ Nutrition and Education is a mobile app that targets millions of parents and caregivers in rural China and provides a solution to the regions’ early childhood underdevelopment problems. It provides recommendations for healthy meals and age-appropriate educational activities, measures children’s daily intake of calories and macro-nutrients (protein, carbs, and fats), and provides a way to have fun through activities that teach skills and values so as to prevent the underdevelopment of rural children’s physical, intellectual and mental growth. We applied our application to a group of participants (ages 6-12) and conducted a qualitative evaluation of the approach. The results show that the nutritional calculator feature can help parents improve the nutritional health of their children. Though two of the underweight participants lost weight and two of the overweight participants gained weight while using the recommended nutritional plan, we believe that the recommended nutritional menu could be an excellent feature for this application after we adjust some of the parameters since some parents claimed they could not follow the recommended menus.

Computer Science, Game, Art Design.