The PNA project

The Personal Nutrition Assistant (PNA) Project is a join effort involving faculty and students from two universities. The project was initially funded with a seed grant that supported cooperative efforts between these institutions. The goal of the PNA Project was the creation of a working prototype of a web-based system that assisted individuals in performing a nutritional analysis of their daily diet and made the results available via the web to their health care professionals. Further, we wanted the data entry to be easy and quick. We had providing a system that helped clients performing daily diet data entry and analysis in about 15 to 20 minutes. As stated above, the system produced through the initial grant was a working prototype, a system that demonstrated the feasibility of the approach. Further, since the daily diets are stored on the web the results could be viewed by the clients' dietician or health care provider, providing much greater feedback from the clients to the health care professional than is normally achieved. The initial system was so successful that nine local medical centers started using the working prototype with their patients. The system will form the basis of Senior Projects starting in the 2000-2001 academic year, and is expected to support additional projects in the years to come. This paper reports on the first projects, which were designed to upgrade this system from working prototype status to production level.