Diet and Nutrition App Development: How Diet Apps Help Old Age People

Older adults are the most vulnerable to the worst effects of coronavirus. According to WHO, during such a pandemic, the older adults will need the most extra care and safety precautions to help them stay safe. Thus, digital applications like diet app development, food delivery apps, med apps, and other online telemedicine & nutrition app are increasing in demand.

According to the March 4, 2020, analysis of the National Health Institute in Italy, there were 105 patients who died from the virus with an average age of 81. This finding leads to another best data from China’s Center for Disease Control. In one of the research generated in February 2020, researchers looked at the first 72,314 patients with positive or suspected COVID-19 & discovered a huge variation in the virus affecting rate by age group. In short, the virus is deadlier in people with each passing decade.

COVID-19-age-group-distribution

Source: Vox

So, with the social distancing in practice, the people have slowed down. With technological advancement, the online market place is booming with app ideas like on-demand food delivery apps, diet apps, fitness apps, as people will opt for online solutions.

Despite the quarantine, food is the one basic necessity practiced by everyone in the world. Thus, the online fitness segment from diet food to nutritious meal plans will be widely explored by all age groups. Being a professional dietitian or a health fitness expert, you can develop a diet app and seize this opportunity for a lifetime.

Using digital applications you can engage a consumer demographic that’s usually the last to get on the tech disruption bandwagon. The fact that people are hygiene and diet-conscious will automatically increase the need for online diet food and diet coach.

So, is your business ready for the increasing demand? Have you thought about the specific process to keep up with your business during the virus outbreak?

We at Space-O Technologies Canada will take you through the online solution, and how to deal with such flu and virus situation online.

Now, let’s have a look at how your application development can help old adults during such a lockdown or quarantine period.

How is a diet app helpful to senior citizens?

“One spares old people just as one spares children.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When you are dealing with old adults, you have to come handy with all the facilities like kids. Thus, if you are aiming to become among the best apps to check on the elderly than you have to study all possible scenarios of mishaps with them and develop an app accordingly.

Many of the seniors who sign up now will appreciate the convenience of your weight loss app. Their smartphone will become a perfect tool for managing the diet, activity level, doctor’s appointments, and more. Also, your app can become a one-stop destination for check up on symptoms, browsing specialists, making better food choices, calorie count, or working for mindfulness with a quick tap of the screen anytime, anywhere.

Being the leading app development service provider company in Toronto, Canada, we have curated the ways in which your diet and nutrition app can help the health industry when it comes to seniors and their health issues.

  • Help with food and essentials

    If you are aiming to become the top diet and nutrition app for elderly monitoring then you need to amalgamate some extra functionality. At the time of a flu-like COVID-19, there are lots of nonperishable items that have been stocked by the people in their houses like sanitizers and toilet paper. If you look at the actual necessity of using such essentials, old adults will top the charts.

    Your diet and nutrition app has to have a separate corner for food & essentials where the old adults can order their routine stuff and avoid risking a trip to the store to fill their empty shelves. You can also integrate an additional feature of “request your neighbor” in your app so that they have easy access to their necessities.

    According to a report fromThe New York Times, 60% of Americans have at least one chronic condition; 40% have more than one.

    With this feature, they can notify their neighbors, about their shopping list by selecting the necessary diet food and commodities. They can help them set up a revolving delivery from the grocery store and hence the seniors remain indoor without any future worries.

  • Integrate weight tracker, calories counter, for maintaining food database

    Your elderly monitoring app must have these functions to maintain their daily diet plans and food database. Let’s understand a gist about these feature integrations.

    1. Weight Tracker: When we talk about the senior’s health criteria there are many diseases like blood pressure, diabetes, that trigger their weight gain or weight loss. Thus, you need to integrate a tracker that defines their health goals according to their weight.

    2. Calorie counter: To keep a track of their calorie intake, your diet application should have a calorie counter. As beginners, they might take some time to adjust to adding and measuring their calories throughout the day, but eventually, it will get much easier for them.

    3. Meal plan: Customize a meal planner for a week or month. This will help them adapt to a healthy lifestyle and maintain a regime with diet food and products. Through machine learning technology, you can easily maintain health records and predict their next meals along with their health status. This will make your application engaging and flourishing with AI-based solutions.

Thinking of creating an online presence of your business?

Discuss it with us.

Cta Image

We at Space-O Technologies Canada, develop custom web and mobile-based solutions for the healthcare industry which consists of wellness apps, telemedicine, mHealth, Remote Healthcare, hospital management, and more. So, if you have a diet app idea, consult us soon.

  • Connect with trusted organizations for crowdfunding

    Along with keeping diet trackers and other daily checkups you can collaborate with trusted organizations or communities. This will encourage crowdfunding, wherein, the old adults can pitch the existing users to pay their senior delivery fees or even send food directly to their house verifying their identities of being an old adults.

    Expert tip: You can also reduce or eliminate the fees for seniors if they order a healthy meal from your application development. Along with that, you can also integrate a social media platform wherein they can post their pictures, food experience, as well as user experience of using the app. This will be one of the sources of direct marketing or advertisement for your app.

  • Virtual assistance from doctors, med experts, health coach

    With health tips, weight charts, nutrition goals, you can also help them with a health coach and doctor’s appointments. It is not safe for people above 60 to vouch for doctor’s appointments, including wellness visits. As a digital platform, you can easily engage more audiences by collaborating with health specialists as well as coaches/trainers to meet the emergency situation related to their health. Any query or information can be eliminated just a click away on their phone through an in-app video call facility.

    Expert tip: For more user engagement you can also integrate lifestyle quizzes, weight loss goals and challenges, goal setting with professional trainers, daily tasks, and activities, which will make your app more interactive and will retain users for a long time.

Now, after understanding the importance of your application in the lives of old people, you must be putting your ideas into action. So, the very first step after generating an app idea is to research your competitors. There are thousands of health and fitness apps on the apps store with different tools. We have narrowed down the analysis for you and brought some of the best nutrition apps that help users to maintain their health from home. You may come across certain beneficial information for your app development.

  • Features of the app
  • UI/UX experience of the users
  • Rating and recommendation on the app stores
  • Technical stack used to develop the application
  • Subscriptions and other in-app purchases with their charges

This will help you in making your idea clear and make unique features and functionalities for the app for weight loss or a healthy diet and nutrition app for seniors.

4 Top Diet App Developments to Consider While Developing Your Online Business

App NameFeaturesApp Store LinkPlay Store Link
  • Tracking food intake & food insights with an exercise plan
  • Seamlessly integrates with wearables (Apple Health apps)
  • Allows users to add their own recipes
  • Free health and diet tips from professional experts
  • Motivation from the app community
  • Personalized Fooducate goals
App storePlay store
  • Create custom recipes with a mix of ingredients
  • View or search data from Apple Watch app
  • This app works offline with no internet required
  • Database of nearly 200,000 foods without using any data
  • A user can create their own list of favorite food
App storePlay store
  • Users choose a fitness plan suitable to them
  • The app has a water tracker to measure the water intake along with the food intake recorder
  • It also has a barcode scanner that scans the calories from a food item
  • Imparts knowledge on the alternative to favorite foods
  • Users can keep track of their fitness goals and eating habits over time.
App storePlay store
  • It has an integrated in-app pedometer that looks after the food and exercise of users.
  • Customized coaching and daily goals set by a diet coach
  • Personalized goal settings with coaching from the experts
  • Cutting edge technology for food logging
  • Individual weight graphs showing the weight goal
  • Unlock healthy recipes
  • Personalized feedback or recommendation on the food log by users
App storePlay store
  1. Fooducate

    fooducate

    Source: Fooducate

    Fooducate nutrition tracker tracks the everyday dietary habits of the users. It even predicts what exactly the user’s diet habits are along with calorie counting technology. The free part of the comprehensive application consists of the following features.

    The in-app purchases are followed by Keto diet and low-carb diet, weekly health, and diet tips, priority support, are some of the features which you can study before finalizing your user interface for the online diet coaching. You can also integrate wearable devices where they can know their heart rate, pulse, and water intake.

    ProsCons
    • Users can track their calories, macros, workouts.
    • The app scans over 2,50,000 product barcodes.
    • Nutritional professionals give free health and diet tips.
    • Every unique feature and functionality is behind a paywall.
    • Limited micronutrient data.
    • Improper classification of items as GMO or FODMAP.
  2. Nutrients

    nutrients

    Source: Nutrients

    Nutrients app allow users to search for specific foods or ingredients. They can also view the nutrition breakdowns of a given commodity. The fitbit app also allows them to do their research on a particular nutrient like Vitamins or Potassium and then find their food items. The health app has the following features.

    If you are planning to have an online business of such nutrition apps then do look after such features for easy navigation and no restrictions UX experience, nutrition information, which will, in turn, increase the engagement of the app. This will, in turn, bring you a loyal consumer base.

    ProsCons
    • The app works offline without the internet.
    • It has a huge database of over 2,00,000 foods that is accessible offline.
    • It allows the user to create his own recipe, add ingredients & select the serving size to get comprehensive nutrition facts for the particular recipe.
    • The database only has products listed under the big American food companies. There is no local market product listing in the app.
    • Too many inconsistencies and inaccuracies when it comes to nutrition tracking and counting on a daily basis.
    • It needs some more features for successful user experience.
  3. Lifesum

    lifesum

    Source: Lifesum

    This is a personalized diet and meal planning app that consists of many other features like an exercise routine, calorie counter, healthy recipes, water tracking, all in one place. Instead of measuring micronutrients & macronutrient intake, this app aims to help the user build a healthy lifestyle. Have a look at some of its features.

    The premium subscription of this app provides specialized diet plans, as well as a detailed breakdown of food nutrition, and in-app integration of fitness trackers and other smart devices.

    ProsCons
    • It has a meal planner and macro tracker.
    • It integrates with Google Fit and S Health allowing users to export nutrition and exercise data from the app.
    • It has a health tracker that helps users to be on the top of their fitness regime.
    • The app does not have a basic meal plan in its free version.
    • There is no accuracy in scanning the products or items.
    • The subscription functionality has no canceling/amending option.
  4. Noom

    noom

    Source: Noom

    Noom app is a scientifically-proven psychological approach to weight loss plan and behavior change. It is all about working smarter, it helps users to achieve their goals of dieting, exercising, or changing relationship with food. Have a look at some of its features.

    The developed health application has an interactive dashboard with daily tasks and activities to build healthy habits, rather than unsustainable weight crashes that one can rebound in no time.

    ProsCons
    • Scientifically-proven psychology approach for the body to build healthy habits.
    • Flexible coaching designed to help users achieve short and long-term goals.
    • A battery-friendly pedometer that allows users to count steps.
    • It is too expensive.
    • The automatic reset is making users fussy every time they have to manually add the numbers for weight log.
    • The app software has issues in connecting with wearable devices.

Want to manage your online business using unique features and functionalities?

We at Space-O are known for our custom on-demand delivery app solutions that consist of any food or medicine online services. We have developed an online delivery platform, where residents of Toronto can purchase different products like groceries, food & drinks, tobacco, medicine, pet care items, and other personalized gift items and get them delivered to their doorstep.

You can discuss your full-fledged healthcare application idea with us!

Before concluding the blog let’s go through some more ideas like telemedicine delivery, caregiver’s app, Ecommerce mart for seniors.

3 Successful App Ideas to Develop for Old Adults

As we are moving forward the past generations are adapting the new age digital trends fast. Taxi services and food delivery apps have already started giving preferences to old people and providing them with beforehand services. Similarly, we have curated some app ideas for senior citizens.

  1. Telemedicine app: Through telemedicine or telehealth app, an old adult can anytime consult a doctor via video call technology and get a body checkup. The specialists added in the app are bound to prescribe and check the disease even at 4 A.M. through video chat. So there is no need for emergency in-person meetings.
  2. Caregiver’s app: The caregivers are the life savior when it comes to single old adults staying in a house. This app should have tie-ups with professional caretakers who keep track of appointments to assist in health emergencies. Thus, verified and trusted caregivers coordinate with other family members and monitor their health and its related symptoms.
  3. Ecommerce app: You should develop an eCommerce app only for old adults. It should consist of all the essential medicines for cholesterol or blood sugar, commodities, vegetables, snacks, and other supplements targeted only for your app users. This will engage senior citizens in your app for online shopping and making purchases of their daily necessities.

So if you were also thinking to develop any of the above ideas then, you should discuss it with our professional experts and get some knowledge on the technical part and development cost.

FAQ

  1. How can apps prevent old adults from coronavirus?

    Some experts have suggested that old adults should avoid visiting doctors and take the help of telemedicine apps. They can also order diet food online and keep a track of their weight loss, calorie counters, follow their meal plans, and maintain a healthy eating regime. There are other workouts apps, nutrients apps, scan barcodes app, to track their progress and routine patterns.

  2. What are the best apps for seniors?

    Here are some of the best apps for seniors:

    • MyFitnessPal
    • C25K
    • MapMyWalk
    • Calorie Counter
    • Nutrients
    • Lifesum
    • Noom
  3. How can the crowdfunding app feature help old adults during isolation?

    With the use of a simple UI/UX experience, you can easily navigate users into the app for crowdfunding. Here, an old adult has to pitch an existing userbase to pay senior delivery fees or even send food directly, verifying who is the senior. Being a food app and dealing with any online presence in the form of diet or normal food delivery or nutrients, you can easily integrate this feature and find some help for the senior citizens.

  4. What is the best free food tracking app?

    Tracking food and calorie intake is important. It helps in eating habits and diet diary of the dieters. By integrating a barcode scanner to measure the daily burn of calories. Let’s have a look at the best food tracker app.

    • HealthyOut
    • Yummly
    • Lose It!
    • FatSecret
    • Rise
    • Tasty

Want to create your own diet app and unleash your online opportunity?

Conclusion

Online health and wellness services are a sensible alternative to in-person appointments for old adults. The seniors can easily catch up on their health schedule by joining platforms like the workout app, telemedicine app.

Thus, being a professional health specialist or dietitian, if you have any app idea or plan to develop a mobile app, then it is a must to hire one of the proficient Android/iOS developers who have the beforehand knowledge of developing such healthcare apps.

If you have any queries or confusion regarding apps like fitness pal, how to create a calorie tracker app, or exercise tracker app, we are here to help you with your doubts. Fill up the form in the footer and you will receive technical advice with the project quote from our experts. The consultation is absolutely free.

  • 1
Rakesh Patel

Written by

Rakesh Patel is the Founder and CEO of Space-O Technologies (Canada). He has 28 years of IT experience in business strategies, operations & information technology. He has expertise in various aspects of business like project planning, sales, and marketing, and has successfully defined flawless business models for the clients. A techie by mind and a writer at heart, he has authored two books – Enterprise Mobility: Strategy & Solutions and A Guide To Open311

back to top