This project was apart of my thesis project during my time at NYU's ITP Master's Program. My goal is to try to understand how the foods I eat affect my blood sugar by developing a simple iOS mobile application that tracks blood glucose responses to the food I eat and visualizes them for quick and easy interpretation.
⭐️ Presentation + More Info: https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2020/?khensu-ra
As we all know, the food we eat has a tremendous impact on our health. Any number of measures have been developed to help people try to stay on top of this – including food labels indicating sugar content, salt level, or even the amount of fats, but these do not help us see what’s going on internally. For my thesis project, I was determined to find a simple method of keeping track of the impact of the food I eat on my internal health using a single, somewhat novel measuring unit and applying it to myself in the form of a personal experiment. Using only my post-meal blood sugar responses, my goal was to uncover how the foods I eat affect my body and overall health as a non-diabetic, African American male. This and other health and nutrition issues have been particularly important to me this spring as I’ve found myself living at the epicenter (New York City) of the COVID - 19 Pandemic and seeing its devastating impact on the African-American community. My hope was that my thesis effort would ultimately help me understand how my body responds to food and show me the kinds of foods I should be eating to give me the best odds of staying healthy. For my thesis experiment, I developed a simple iOS mobile application that can be used to track blood glucose responses to the food I eat, visualize them for quick and easy interpretation and indicate to me the foods most optimal to maintaining a healthy body. At the conclusion of my thesis journey, I gained great insights into the challenges of self-health and designing solutions for it. For instance, I realized that using a blood sugar kit to track my blood sugar is very hard and I struggled to maintain consistency. I learned first-hand the unique challenge of designing for an extreme use case— only for myself. On the technical side of things, I discovered how complex building software for health can be. Ultimately, I was able to get to a prototype that gave me a better understanding of the foods I tend to eat and a greater awareness of how my body responds to those foods. However, there is still much work to be done. I look forward to adding more features to make the app more robust and seamless for greater user experience. The final goal is to see if it might be possible to extend it from a personal app to something that will be useful to a greater audience.
At the start of my research, I was unsure about which of my vitals I’d use as an indicator of how my body reacts to different foods. That all changed after reading The Personalized Diet (Eran Elinav and Eran Segal, Grand Central Lifestyle) This book pulled back the curtain on how revealing a post-meal blood sugar response (PMBSR) could help me understand the impact of the foods I eat. In addition, I was excited to learn how a proper analysis of my PMBSR could help me steer clear of heart disease, diabetes, and other metabolic diseases. For these reasons, I decided to use blood sugar readings as my sole barometer. As I conducted comparative research on mobile app solutions with similar goals to mine, one app stood out in particular.
The One Drop app helps users affordably manage diabetes and other chronic illnesses. But unlike most apps out there, One Drop does a much better job of presenting vital information in a clear and cogent way. In addition, their simplistic user interface design helped me set the standard of making sure when I designed my own app, I would not overwhelm my screen with impertinent information. One Drop also provides a community, where you can see other members' data and a newsletter that gives the user information on different health topics. These are features I will definitely consider when targeting a more general audience as my app solely looks at post-meal blood sugar readings and visualizes them. The greatest difference between my app is that it focuses on the visualization of my single measure—post-meal blood sugar response for easy interpretation. The importance of this was discovered during my user testing where the most frequent feedback was on the strength of the clarity and legibility of my visuals.