Process

Jack Saperstone and 2 OthersChristine Bourdeau
Sofia Cabral
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The goal of the studio was to create a website that would act as a decision aid to help users answer complicated questions. 

Often times people are unable to decide what they should eat that is nutritious and healthy for them. We created a website that acts as a decision aid to help you decide what to eat as a healthy meal or snack based on your days previous meals and the recommended daily value of different nutrients.

In order to offer food suggestions, our website takes information from three sources: 1. Sliders that allow the user to indicate approximately what types of nutrients they have consumed. 2. A checkbox that indicates what meal they wish to eat next and hence how many nutrients they need from the food suggestions. 3. A database of food items with their associated nutrients. The nutrients our website considers is protein, fiber, sugar, fat, sodium vitamin A(IU), vitamin c, calcium, iron, magnesium, and potassium. The decision making algorithm starts by computing the remaining nutrients needed by computing the difference between the amount of nutrients they have consumed and the amount of nutrients they need for the next meal. Once this difference is found a search starts which explores a branching tree. Each branch of the tree represents a food item from the database that the user could consume. Each node in the tree represents the remaining nutrients they need to eat. The search stops when the remaining nutrients at a particular node is negative, indicating they have eaten enough. The returned answer is the set of foods associated with the branching path from the root of the tree to the node with zero remaining nutrients.