1. USING PYTHON AND VISUAL PYTHON TO TRACK HEALTH BY, CHASE FORTIER

2. BACKGROUND ON PYTHON -Python is a programming language developed in the 1980s by Guido Van Rossum in the Netherlands. The first code was released in 1991. -Python has a wide array of features. It can be used to process, numbers, text, images, scientific data and other data sets. -Python has been used by many different companies including Google, NASA and Youtube to perform a wide variety of tasks. -Visual Python was developed in 2000, which allows the user to create 3D virtual displays. Source: http://python.about.com/od/gettingstarted/ss/whatispython.htm#step3

3. CURRENT HEALTH TECHNOLOGIES -Today there are many people that use technology to keep track of their health patterns. -There are a multitude of websites and applications that are used to calculate the number of calories a person should be consuming based on their height, weight, weekly exercise and weight watching goals. -Applications are also available that calculate the number of calories a person has eaten in a day based on the foods entered. -A person can also keep track of the number of calories that they have burned in a day based on the amount and type of exercise.

4. PROJECT IDEA -For my project I am interested in using python to create a program that keeps track of the number of calories that I eat in a day. It will have to make automatic calculations based on the data that is input. -I also have to create instructions in python that allow specific foods to correspond with a certain number of calories. -Visual python will be used to create a virtual interface that allows me to enter the foods I have eaten that day.

5. CHALLENGES -It will be difficult to create a database that contains all the foods that I could be eating. For this reason there will also have to be an option to enter the number of calories for a food that is not stored in python. -The number of calories in a specific food could also vary from brand to brand. To help solve this I could try to find the average number of calories over a few brands for each food. - The number of calories also depends on the amount of food eaten. There will have to be an option that asks for the number of servings eaten.

6. OTHER IDEAS AND ALTERNATIVES -I could also use python and visual python to track the number of calories burned through exercise. This could be done as an individual project, or as a supplement to the calorie counter in order to track overall health and whether or not one should be eating more or less. -Another option is creating a program that calculated the number of calories a person should be eating in a day. I would have to research how factors like height, weight and number of hours of exercise affect this number.