Suggestions for existing *open source* food/exercise/illness/etc. logging apps to modify/enhance/integrate

[simonpickering]

Hi all,

Over the years quite a few "issues" have been raised suggesting/requesting that the XDrip+ internal prediction model is modified in some way (e.g. #91, #1519 - please add to the list). I understand that XDrip+ developer effort is limited and there is an understandable reluctance to change and expand the core functionality, especially as people respond very differently to different food stuffs (i.e. compositions), at different times, etc. so this will likely be quite a lot of work.

I would still quite like to at least try to improve the prediction model and also to let myself look back at what's happened more easily to better judge how much insulin to give myself (e.g. pizza!, current blood glucose is X, I did some exercise earlier in the day, what happened the last times I ate something similar, therefore what shall I take this time round....?)

To this end, and to reduce modifications to XDrip+ I think the best bet is to take the food/exercise/illness/etc logging/review and prediction capabilities outside of XDrip+, to feed this external app data from XDrip+ via the web interface, and then to push carbs, insulin and prediction data back to XDrip+, which will require some relatively minor patches, to save having two differing things to look at/fill in. People may disagree, I'm all ears if there are better ideas :)

I think the prediction models should be made relatively easy to modify/update (e.g. via scripting or plugins) so that people can try to tune (or at least swap) them to see if different modelling approaches better suit how their bodies work. To make this useful it requires a decent app to provide the logging and review capability - i.e. logging meals (vs just logging individual food stuffs), breaking the constituent food stuffs down by at the very least carbs, fat, protein and fibre; link to an online database/barcode scanning to lookup food constituents; providing some way to log exercise or interact with e.g. Garmin or other fitness providers, and so on and so forth. This is the sort of thing that dieting apps do, and basing on one of these and having the summarisation functionality is probably a net benefit (even if one moves the focus away from calorie/fat counting)

The logging app itself is a pretty big thing to write and there are a range of ways to organise the different logging elements (i.e. the UI flow, and I'm not a UI designer by any stretch of the imagination and my Android UI experience is very bare bones!) but I'm willing to start from scratch if required, however if there's some code that already exists that does something along the right lines I'm also more than happy to take that and modify it (or at the very least use the structure to work out how to write a specific app).

So my question is, does anyone know of an open source app (even if it's just a bare bones demo on Github) that exists and would make a decent starting point for such a thing, equally are there extant apps which have a good approach to data entry, historic review, etc., that could be copied (even if they are closed source)?