Indoor Beacon Positioning for Dietary Meal Navigation
Solution Overview
Problem
Consumers face difficulties in managing their dietary consumption due to the lack of easy access to detailed nutritional information about food options, especially in social settings like cafeterias or food courts, where it is hard to identify and locate meals that comply with their dietary restrictions and preferences.
Innovation Solution
An indoor positioning system that uses beacons to provide consumers with location-based information about nearby meal options, allowing them to select and navigate to meals that meet their dietary criteria through a mobile application, which integrates with a nutrition management server to filter and display relevant data based on proximity, nutritional content, and consumer-defined constraints.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If consumers manually analyze nutritional information from multiple food sources, then they can identify meals meeting dietary requirements, but this process is time-consuming and difficult to perform daily
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-collecting, organizing, and storing nutritional information for multiple food sources in a database before consumers need it. This allows instant retrieval and analysis of nutritional data without requiring consumers to manually gather information at mealtime, thus maintaining high analysis accuracy while eliminating time consumption.
2Loss of information
If detailed nutritional information is provided for all available meals, then consumers can make informed dietary choices, but the information becomes overwhelming and difficult to navigate
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies local quality by providing different levels of information detail to different users based on their specific dietary needs and preferences. The interface allows consumers to access comprehensive nutritional data when needed while also providing simplified summaries and filtering options for quick decision-making, thus maintaining information completeness while improving ease of operation.
Solution Approach 2:
The system segments nutritional information into organized categories (macronutrients, micronutrients, allergens, dietary restrictions) and provides filtering capabilities. This segmentation allows consumers to access only the specific nutritional aspects relevant to their dietary requirements without being overwhelmed by all available data, balancing information completeness with usability.
3Adaptability or versatility
If consumers use traditional methods to identify compliant meals in cafeterias, then they can find suitable food options, but locating meals that meet dietary restrictions becomes extremely difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The system introduces a mobile application as an intermediary between consumers and food sources. This intermediary automatically queries the database for meals matching the consumer's dietary restrictions, provides navigation to locate these meals in the cafeteria, and updates information in real-time. This eliminates the difficulty of manually detecting and locating compliant meals while maintaining adaptability to various dietary plans.
Data Source
AI summary
A method to integrate location signals received from indoor positioning systems in order to generate an interactive dataset-based map is disclosed. The method comprises receiving an identifier and location information from a consumer device. The method comprises determining a current location for the consumer device based on the signal strength received from a beacon. The method comprises determining whether the identifier and the current location are associated with the consumer device in a database. The method comprises generating a set of meal datasets within a predetermined proximity to the consumer device. The method comprises generating a first graphical user interface to display the set of meals on the consumer device and receiving a selection of meals from the consumer device. The method comprises generating a second graphical user interface configured to display instructions to reach physical locations of the selected meal datasets in relation to the consumer device.