Dietary Application for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
During the Fall semester of 2017, I took MIS 3502 with Jeremy Shafer. After bringing his son Leo to class, Jeremy and a dietitian from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia described the difficulties of preparing recipes for children with feeding tubes. The class was then divided into groups of four and each group received the task of building a working application that would assist caregivers in preparing recipes for children with feeding tubes. The application was to be built using development skills we were learning in class. PHP was the main back-end language that made up the majority of the functionality of the app, Bootstrap and HTML/CSS were implemented for structure and styling, while JavaScript was used for click events and field suggestions/operations. SQL was also used to pull information from a localhost database which was used to store information entered by the user such as food items and nutritional information. One of the biggest challenges of the application was accommodating the different dietary needs of certain children. For example, if a child had an allergy to certain food items the daily nutritional value lost from that item would need to made up elsewhere. Since there were certain dietary parameters that needed to be met (i.e. daily calorie count), this created a challenge for the group when programming the app. Overall, this project created value for the class by providing us with a wider array of programming skills than offered anywhere else in the MIS program. As a result, students had more skills to add to their repertoire for future IT opportunities in the professional world.