Resources
Data on nutrient intake and healthiness
Being Healthy is a Revolutionary Act (a manifesto for thriving in a mixed-up world)
Nature.com Nutrigenomics Outlook: A flavour of the future (digital health, DNA, and nutrition; PDF)
Reactome (Curated knowledgebase of biological pathways in humans)
Dr. Hyman's Health Library (functional medicine practitioner)
Ray Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage (a book on how to prolong life indefinitely)
Concept
In trying to eat properly, one of the biggest problems I run into is in trying to figure out if what I'm eating is actually doing me any good.
It's easy to understand the short-term effects of food because you feel different immediately, but the long term is very difficult to sort out because there are so many intertwingling factors. To sort it out, I'd need some kind of accounting and analysis system.
FitDay is a great model for a system like this. It lets you enter body characteristics, as well as every meal you eat, and displays the daily nutrient intake in pie-charts and tells you if you've met your recommended daily intake of everything.
This is very useful, however I think it could be improved if it did the following:
- Let you select the goal(s) you want to attain by eating well (i.e. changing your body type, treating depression, etc.)
- Show you the long-term effects of your current eating habits and how far it is straying from your goal
- Suggest foods you should be eating
Beside the food items you're selecting from the database, have pictures (i.e. how big is a medium tomato???)
More advanced features that could be integrated are:
- Select all the meals you want to eat for the next week, place them on a chart, and generate a shopping list from the ingredients required of all those recipes
After collecting enough data, the ability to predict a tasty week of meals!
It would also be excellent if modern medical knowledge could be integrated into it, so if you'd been diagnosed with an illnesses or you have a strange physiology, it could tell you foods you should eat to counter it.
Any predictions the system makes will be supported by user feedback. This way, it can improve itself!
Challenges
The hardest things about this project would be collecting a good clean database of VALID, TESTED scientific data, and the complex logic required to do all of the prediction and adaptation based on the user's feedback.
Getting it Made
The two obvious routes to go in attaining the funding for a system like this are:
- A Government with a vested interest in public health
- Some Big Businesses who can make lots of money off public health
I think The Government is a better option. The Canadian Government would be interested because it could potentially reduce the health care costs incurred by treating illnesses that could be prevented with a relatively cheap system like this.
A good idea would be to find statistics on how much money is spent on treating people for things that could be avoided or even cured with this system.