BenTogether

Healthy eating for families is a topic of growing importance in our world. According to the CDC, childhood obesity has more than doubled in the past 20 years. As part of the HCDE Capstone, I and a team of 4 other people decided to tackle this problem by making healthy eating fun.

BenTogether is a system to make nutrition education more fun, and increase communication about eating habits between parents and children. We accomplished this by gamifying healthy meal selection, and by building an app that allows parents to review their child's meal preferences and offer feedback. This way, parents learn more about the foods their children enjoy, and children are rewarded for smart eating decisions.

Our vision for the project was to digitally enable the lunchbox, allowing kids to spend points in the app on unlocking lights and sounds for their lunchbox. We made a basic prototype of this functionality using Arduino.

My contribution to this project was building the iPhone app using Apache Cordova, as well as writing the Arduino code to drive the LCD display for the interactive lunchbox.

The entire process book can be found here.

The code for BenTogether can be found here.