Majority of people from poorer regions are found to suffer from various health issues and problems like obesity, diabetes etc. Moreover, people from these regions cannot afford the costly fees of nutritionists and lack adequate knowledge of such issues and appropriate actions they should take to lead a healthy life. Nowadays quite some organizations and institutions are concentrating on bettering health and other issues faced in third world countries, however, there are states inside United States of America which lie adequately below poverty line, example – Mississippi. To help such states, we built a mobile application which will help people to keep track of their nutrition and get valuable suggestions and recommendations. It also provides information about some of the major health issues in such regions. Our application – Health4U – not only provides such useful features to users, but also is provides vendors an easy way to add new data to the application. Further it provides a very well designed class hierarchy and rich APIs which can be used by any mobile application developer for writing their code.

Overall Health4U deals with the development of mobile application which provides users from low income region of Mississippi with a Nutrition intake advisor, a guide for fitness and a repository for health problems. The main purpose of this application is to build consciousness and awareness among the people of Mississippi.

Motivation

Aforesaid, a few states in United States of America are below poverty line. People inhabiting such states are most of the times bound to have poor nutrition intake. Though low income is one reason to have inadequate nutrition, more importantly it is the unawareness among people about available and affordable means. It can be observed that most of the common foods have varying nutrition contents and some may be good for some diet and others may not. Thus a proper mentor is needed who will guide people which food is supposed to be eaten for a corresponding diet and what should be avoided. Such a mentor should be easily available and moreover free of any fees so that common man makes a better use of it. We targeted such audience and tried to build an application which will help them keep track of their diet and give them valuable suggestions about their food habits.

Why we chose mobile phones? Majority of people have mobile phones and they like to spend time using their mobiles. Most of them prefer getting a lot of updates like news etc. on their device. Also it is handy to carry a mobile phone to any place. Thus providing an application on mobile phone assures a maximum usage of our application for betterment of health.

Target Audience

For overall health care, Mississippi is ranked 50th or last place of all the states [1], according to the commonwealth fund a nonprofit foundation working to advance performance of the health care system. Mississippi has the lowest per capita personal income of any state in United States of America.

30 percent of Mississippi's residents are classified as obese. Also Mississippi had the highest rate of obesity of any U.S. state from 2005-2008 and also ranks first in the nation for high blood pressure and diabetes.

 In a 2008 study of African American women, contributing risk factors was shown to be: lack of knowledge about body mass index (BMI), dietary behavior, physical activity and lack of social support, defined as motivation and encouragement by friends.Thus from the above data we concluded that there is a need for people of Mississippi region to have a simple, easy to use and yet highly useful mobile application which will advise them on their diet and provide valuable information about major health issues.