INTRODUCTION Nowadays, the majority of people do not pay attention to food that they eat due to a lack of time and ignorance of health conditions. However, health care especially with food topics tends to have an influence on some groups of healthy people in society. Food causes the body to gain nutrition and is essential to life. Healthy food is important for the system inside the body because the food choices each day affect the health condition. Good nutrition is an important part of leading a healthy lifestyle [1]. In addition to healthy food, self-care is another action of humans that can cause a healthy lifestyle [2]. People can take care of themselves by using the knowledge of self-care, which means that they should learn to control, deliberate and selfinitiate the food consumed and calories burned each day. Especially for patients, self-management is very important and crucial for them to get rid of their illness. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) [3] are the diseases that are not caused by bacteria or infection through touching or carriers, but are caused by the result of lifestyle and the risky behaviors in eating. NCDs have become the number one cause of deaths in Thailand with more than 300,000 fatalities each year [4]. NCDs consist of Diabetes Mellitus, Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Diseases, Cancer, Hypertension, Obesity, etc. Thus, people would be able to have a healthy life without diseases and reduce the risk of NCDs if they usually exercise and eat nutritional food daily. Recently, technology devices such as smart phones and tablets have an impact on everyday lives. The significant growth is a mobile application often used every day. Lately, many people tend to use a mobile phone instead of a personal computer. Android is one of the most popular operating systems in the world. Especially in Thailand, Android has the highest proportion of Thai mobile operating system market share [5]. Hence, the researchers use this opportunity to make use of all of this information by creating an application on Android mobile devices. Therefore, FoodForCare is developed to support users, especially patients with NCDs diseases, to record their eating habits. Also, analyze nutrition and calories each day for users to be able to maintain their food intake and heal their ill health condition. The list of food in the application was got from various books such as healthy food [6][7], food for diabetic patients [8][9], and food that use to prevent from diseases [10]. Lastly, the researchers would like to encourage people to pay more attention to the food that they eat. According to the statement “We are what we eat” refers to people having a healthy well-being with the food that they eat everyday.
BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK
A. Self-Care by Healthy Food and Weight Control Self-care [11] is an act when people intend to take care of themselves with respect to physical, mental and emotional health. They may use self-care to prevent themselves from illnesses, try to lose weight, or challenge their self to be healthier. The researchers are focusing on Self-care with nutritional food. Food is the topic that people often overlook, they are too busy or do not have time to consider eating healthy and nutritional food. They usually substitute it with fast food or a snack loaded with sugar instead of a regular nutritional meal. The lack of adequate nutrition will cause people to encounter with many diseases. People can easily self-check their body measurement by having weight control, which can be defined by Body Mass Index (BMI) [12], Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) [13], and Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) [14]. All of these can be calculated by weight, height, age, gender and the daily activities of that person. It is essential to know the overall body status to be aware of health conditions and body metabolism.
B. Survey existing applications A number of existing applications related to food, diet and calories control were explored. Nine interesting applications closely related to the development of FoodForCare are briefly discussed as follows. Table I displays feature comparison of the nine applications with FoodForCare which are CalTracker[ 15], Calories Diary [16], F oodiEat[ 17], Kcal Check Calories[18], Calories Counter[19], Low Calories Recipe[20], Food That Help Your Body Heal[21], My Diet Diary[22], and Clean Food[23]. Most of the applications have only some basic features such as record, calculate and analyze calories in each day. However, all applications surveyed still had some weak points. Many applications do not provide nutritional information, clean food and a food guide. It would be more convenient for users to use one application like FoodForCare that can provide all features.
C. Related work S. Kasim et al. [24] described an Android application created with the main purpose to help users managed their calories consumed per day. It would help ensure users receive a better and healthier life and decrease the diseases problem. The significant advantage of this application is that it can compare calories eaten and burned in a day. Moreover, S. B. Ahire et al. [25] discussed the ontology semantic framework that would suggest Health Care system to give accurate information based on user input. It helps society to have a healthy food by categorizing and suggesting knowledge of food and sensible amounts of exercise by using a decision tree algorithm. L. 1. Paiva et al. [26] discussed the strategies that would change the increasing number of NCDs patients. A lack of knowledge in nutrition information leads to an unhealthy diet. They introduced the Knowledge-Attitude-Behavior (KAB) Model, which focuses on behavioral change in diet that may be caused by a lack of time or money, habits, social norm, and available technologies. Furthermore, S. Scerri et al. [27] described the review of systems and challenges in the area of human computer interaction (HCI) to give a better way to reduce the risk of health problems. The purpose is to enhance the usage of computer technologies with nutrition and human health.