Gestational diabetes is a complex condition that pregnant women can face, which involves continuous dietary management. This can be difficult for dietitians, as they have to create personalised meal plans for each patient, depending on their needs, with extremely stringent criteria to ensure it is effective and safe (McIntyre et al. 2019). This is extremely time-consuming, and relies on traditional methods. NUTRIA is an ongoing project developed by Fraunhofer AICOS that aims to solve this issue, stemming from the need to digitally transform this workflow.

Over the course of this semester, development focused on successfully implementing new features on the frontend. Key new elements included fully updating a meal deletion feature, streamlining the patient’s blood glucose measurement page to account for only hyperglycaemia, allowing dietitians to add existing foods alongside their equivalents to a meal plan, and an equivalent portion scaling system that automatically adjusts portion sizes of equivalent foods based on changes to the main food.

A usability study was conducted after the fact, with four participants from the university cohort taking part in a think-aloud session, an interview, and a User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). They highlighted key strengths of the application, such as its user interface, navigation, and its overall ambitions. Participants additionally provided critical feedback by suggesting potential improvements to the application, such as a reformed date/time system, as well as an overhaul to editing and visualisation of patient data.

All planned development work on this project was successfully completed, moving NUTRIA significantly closer to a complete release. Future work on this application should aim to implement unit tests for software stability over time, and address suggestions from the usability study.

References: McIntyre, H.D., Catalano, P., Zhang, C., Desoye, G., Mathiesen, E.R. and Damm, P. 2019. Gestational diabetes mellitus. Nature Reviews Disease Primers 5(1), p. 47. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41572-019-0098-8