Caloric Intake Management System

Greg GatesEnayat Qayumi

Project Definition

• The goal of this project is to design, build, and test a system in which there is interface between a food weighing scale and a calculator, and between the calculator and a computer in order to collect and store caloric intake data for analysis.

Significance• Bomb calorimetry

– tedious, time consuming, limits study to area

• Other methods, very inaccurate (20-45%)• 220 active protocols, could be used in any energy

monitoring clinical trial• NESSy similar & accurate, a little cumbersome• This device

– Portable, keeps long-term data for improved accuracy, digital scale for improved accuracy, convenient, user friendly

Background & Planning

• Last year, students never actually designed anything, couldn’t connect components, write working program, or write database

• TI 86 chosen do to user friendliness, & memory (128k, 96k free)

• LS 2000 scale chosen over last year’s CT 600 do to cost ($85 vs. $356) & increased load capacity (2000g vs. 600g)

• Dr. Buchowski interested in use for developing for convenient nutritional study data collection methods.

Objectives

• Would prefer for the calculator to talk to the scale

• Calculator must be programmed to store food type & amount

• Calculator must store multiple entries, and account for unfinished meals

• Data must be transferable to computer database

• Database must read calculator output and transfer to working data

• Database must store long-term data

Database Layout

• Contains 3 tables: ABBREV, PatientData, RecordTable

• Contains 2 queries: FindTotalCal goes through the record table and selects each code for each personal ID, then calculates the calories from the ABBREV table. FinalCalc sums the the numbers generated by the FindTotalCal query.

• Results shown by Patient ID in a Form, Subform format

Flow Chart of Entire Process

Sample Screen Shot from the Calculator

Work Completed

• The experimental food types have been categorized into a workable list of approximately 500.

• Programming of the calculator is complete.

• The basic Access database is complete, minor debugging details are being worked out & the database is being made more user friendly

Current Status

• We are testing the calculator program for efficiency and workability

• The Access database is being improved so that uninformed users can manipulate the data

• We are awaiting word from TI on their communication port specs, and have contacted Dr. Broderson about finding the baud rates and parity

Future Plans

• A process for transfer of information from the calculator to the database will be devised.

• The scale will be connected to the calculator, allowing that TI doesn’t claim proprietary rights to the port specs.

• We will connect the scale to the device & package the 3 components together.

Future Plans (continued)

• We will continue to test the components on ourselves to improve the design, then test the device on a limited number of patients.

• The long term goal is to have this computerized system replace the manual system already employed by the nutritionists.