Design and Development of Watch My Calorie: A Smart Mobile App for Personalized Nutritional Insights

Abstract

While several calorie-tracking mobile applications already exist, many fall short of user expectations, especially in localisation, personalisation, and user interaction. This highlights the need for a solution that balances practical usefulness with ease of use. This study aims to design and develop a mobile application to help users monitor their daily calorie intake while promoting a healthy, balanced lifestyle. This application includes personalised features such as meal tracking, BMI calculation, nutritional insights, and healthy dietary recommendations. Watch My Calorie aims to provide an intuitive, visually engaging, user-friendly interface that makes it easy to track calorie intake and analyse dietary habits, quickly identifying relevant nutritional patterns. This study details the application's design, development, and assessment process, using Flutter and Firebase as the primary technologies. The application also provides tailored health recommendations based on activity levels and health conditions. The findings showed high satisfaction with ease of use and feature relevance, confirming alignment with user expectations. The acceptance dimension scored an average of 5.79, indicating strong user trust and satisfaction. Overall, the findings suggest that Watch My Calorie meets user expectations and provides a practical solution for self-monitoring calorie intake. The high usability and satisfaction scores suggest that a culturally relevant, user-centred application can significantly support users in managing their nutrition; this strengthens previous findings that effective calorie tracking tools positively impact eating behaviours. This study contributes to the growing field of mobile health (mHealth) applications by integrating personalised mobile nutrition tracking into everyday life to promote long-term health awareness and behavioural change.