Thanks for taking the time to articulate your suggestion so well, we'll keep it in mind!
TAVILA 6/17/06 1:41 A
It is difficult to go to various pages to look up recorded info, then try to remember it all in your head (writing it down is a hassle too), before going to the Healthy Lifestyle Scale page to enter the info again there and calculate the result. Could you make it so that when you go the Healthy Lifestyle Scale page, you can click on a button that says "Find Totals" and it will insert the correct info into the boxes from your recorded info on the food tracker and exercise tracker? For the fruit and veggie totals, there could be sections for each of these on the Weekly Progress chart of the Food Tracker. Whenever you enter a fruit or veggie into the top ("Today") section of the Food Tracker, it should automatically add this into your fruit or veggie total for that day on the Weekly Progress chart. If it would be too hard or time-consuming to designate in the computer database which foods are fruits and veggies and what counts as 1 serving of these (which would be extremely helpful, but could be a future goal) then you could at least put a box in the "Add a Food" window that lets you manually indicate if this item is a fruit, or if it is a vegetable, and how many servings of it you are eating. You would need to be able to say how many servings you are eating because, depending on the food you've chosen and how you've measured it, you may not have already indicated the number of "servings" as opposed to cups, slices, etc. Some people may know what counts as 1 serving of a particular fruit or vegetable; others may just guess or simply count it as 1 serving no how many cups, etc. they ate. Then when you go to the Healthy Lifestyle Scale and click on the "Find Totals" button, the totals for fruits and for vegetables from that day's Weekly Progress chart would automatically be inserted into the box. For sleep, the person can manually enter the number of hours, and they could choose to do it two ways: hours they slept the night before or hours they are planning to sleep tonight (based on what time they are going to bed and what time they have set their alarm clock for). This brings me to the next point. Some people, because of their work schedule, do not end their "day" and go to bed until after midnight. I, for example, do not have to be up very early so I usually go to bed after midnight. Since this is the case, people should be able to calculate the totals for food, exercise, water, sleep--everything--at any time up to 24 hrs. after the calendar day has ended. They then indicate from a drop down box whether they are calculating totals for the previous calendar day or the current calendar day. (These would be the only 2 choices.) To give another scenario, a nightshift worker like my father might go into work at 6 PM on June 17th and get home at 6 AM on June 18th. Before going to bed at 7 AM on June 18th, he would calculate his Healthy Lifestyle Totals for the "day" he is now ending, which he would label "June 17." It is also important that people can calculate Healthy Lifestyle Scale totals up to two times on the same calendar day, as long as they are indicating that those calculations are for separate "days". This is necessary because many nightshift workers like my father work schedules of 3 days on, 3 days off. Thus, at the end of 3 days of work, he would calculate his totals at 6 AM on June 18th, indicating from the dropdown box that this calcuation is for the "day" he is labeling June 17th. Then he might go to bed for little while, get up in a few hours and stay up until night. At 11 PM (still on the calendar day June 18th), he would do another Healthy Lifestyle Scale calculation, the second he has entered on that calendar day, but this time he would label the calculation as being for June 18th. Then he goes to bed at 11:30 PM, which he must do in order to switch his hours back to "normal" for the next few days. This may be disruptive for his circadian rhythm, but it is the only way he can spend a decent amount of time with his wife and family and participate in the world. Many people besides nightshift workers may want to calculate their Healthy Lifestyle Scale totals for one day (e.g. June 17th) on the following day (June 18th), waking up on the morning of June 18th and going to the computer immediately to enter the number of hours they slept last night, June 17th, thus completing their calculations for June 17th and finding out if yesterday was a good or bad day overall. Other people may consider the hours they slept last night (which may span the overnight hours of calendar days June 17th and June 18th), which they wait and enter into the computer before going to bed on June 18th along with June 18th's food and exercise totals, as being the calculations for the "day" of June 18th. Different people will have different preferences in how they consider/label the day's calculations for sleep and the other factors too (if you go to bed after midnight you may also have eaten or exericesd after midnight)and when they choose to enter the information. The system should be set up in a way that gives people the freedom to make these calculations in whatever way works best for them as long as they complete calculations for each "day" within 24 hours following that calendar day. Any system will work fine as long as people are consistent. The system can easily accomodate all people's preferences by offering a simple drop-down box to choose which day this calculation is "for": the previous or current calendar day. It would be even more helpful if the system allowed the number of hours of sleep to be entered and SAVED without calculating the overall Lifestyle Scale result yet. That way, some people may choose to wake up in the morning, enter the number of hours they slept last night right away, before they forget, but then wait until bedtime that night, when they will have the totals for food, exericse, etc., to calculate the final Lifestyle Scale result. All this sounds complicated, but I think it is important to make the Healthy Lifestyle Scale as easy to use and accurate as possible because it is such an important tool to give people an overall view of how they have done on a given day, which helps motivate them.
