6

CHAPTER 2

THEORETICAL FOUNDATION

This chapter will provide the theoretical explanation of aspects those are included in

the development process of the thesis.

2.1. Food and Dietary

In order to achieve a healthy life, people must maintain a good balance of the foods

they eat. This balanced food plan is well known as the eatwell plate and good to be

applied for all people whether they have healthy weight or overweight [5]. People

often think

Figure 2. 1 Eatwell Plate

that if they are not overweight, they do not need to control their meal plan so they

can eat as much as they want and often unhealthy food that would impact to an

unhealthy eating habit. In order to reach a healthy dietary plan, one must follow the

eatwell plate and maintain their eating habit so his body will receive all nutrition

needed in an ideal proportion,

7

2.1.1. Food’s Nutrition Fact

Food’s nutrition fact is a collection of information that tells consumer the detail

of a product. On a packaged food such as canned food or boxed cereals and

snacks, the nutrition fact label could be found printed on the packaging. With

the nutrition facts, people will know what do they consumed and also the ideal

portion for each serving so it can help people to control their meal and diet plan.

Here is an example of nutrition fact label [6]:

Figure 2. 2 Food Nutrition Fact Example

However, there are many foods those don’t have the nutrition facts label on it,

especially when we are buying a cooked food or fast food in the restaurants or

food market. Actually, a restaurant must have the information about the nutrition

facts of the foods they serve. However, for many well-known restaurants,

especially those have their chain store all over the world and own a lot of

franchise store, there are online databases those have the listing of the menus

and calories of the foods they served.

8

With all of these data available, people actually could track down what do they

eat, create a memo to remind them and at the end of the day, they can know how

much calories and nutrition do they consume at that day. This data could be a

reference for them to balance their life with other activities such as sport to

maintain their body in a healthy condition.

2.1.1.1. Nutritionix Nutritionix is an online service that provides a food nutrition database that

can be accessed from the website or using their API. Using their service, we

can search for any food and get the nutrition information about that particular

food. The search result is complete with calories, carbohydrates, protein and

other basic food nutritional information.

2.1.2. Obesity

Obesity, as defined by NHS is a term used to describe an overweight person

with a lot of body fat [7]. In this society nowadays, obesity is a common

problem that approximately affect one of every four adults and one in every five

children aged around 10. At present, obesity is very common because people are

living in a world where everything could be done at ease without requiring them

to move their body. With the technology getting more advances, television

programs and video games are the most popular entertainment. This condition

makes people lazy to do activities such as sports and finally they become couch

potato while on the other hand, people consume more and more foods.

In order to prevent obesity, we must know whether one is in a healthy weight

range or not. Body Mass Index (BMI) weight calculator is the most common

tool to be used. The BMI calculator is a measurement tool that will count an

index showing if a person is in a healthy weight range or not.

These formula and range of index are the parameters used to calculate the BMI

[8]:

• Formula: BMI = weight (kg) / [height (m)]2

• BMI Results:

9

o BMI < 18.5 – Underweight

o 18.5 < BMI < 24.9 – Normal

o 25.0 < BMI < 29.9 – Overweight

o 30.0 < BMI – Obese

With these index, people could know in what area are their body weight

healthiness so they could maintain their weight in order to gain a more healthy

body.

2.1.3. Diet

As defined by oxford dictionary [9], diet is a special course of food to which a

person restricts themselves, either to lose weight or for medical reasons. Based on

the definition, it could be clearly seen that diet is a solution for overweight and

obese people to live more healthily and achieve a good body weight proportion.

However, most people get the wrong idea of going on diet so, when they go on

diet, they only minimize the amount of foods those they eat and not follow the

foods those eatwell plate recommend. This kind of diet is not recommended.

A good diet should be a healthy and balanced diet. In this healthy diet, people

should eat more fruit and vegetables, plenty of carbohydrates such as bread, rice

and pasta, some protein from meat, fish, eggs, etc and some milk and dairy foods

[10]. People must reduce their sugar and fat consumption so their body will get

balanced nutrition. This healthy diet, not only reducing people’s weight but as

well, help people to lower risk of heart disease, stroke and cancers.

2.1.4. Basal Metabolic Rate

Basal Metabolic Rate is the most popular way for people to help them

determining their daily calories needs in order to do a proper diet [11]. Using the

BMR formula, people need to input their details into account; they are body

weight and height, age, gender and exercise level. The result of this calculation

will let you know your daily calories intake needed to maintain your weight.

With the number from the BMR calculation, people can calculate their daily

calories needed to lose weight and maintain a healthy diet. On a normal rate, one

Pound of fat equals 3500 calories, which means that by reducing 500 calories /

10

day, one can lose one Pound or around 0.5 Kilogram weight a week. However,

people often reduce their calories below the healthy limit. In order to start a

healthy diet, a person must know that for a man, it require minimum calorie intake

of 1800 while for women, their body need at least 1200 calories per day [11].

By maintaining a healthy meal plan and following the daily calorie budget, people

can maintain a healthy diet and progressing to lose weight.

2.2. The Internet

In this era, everything in this world is connected through the cyber world and thanks

to the Internet; now everyone can share and retrieve information at their fingertips.

Internet is a collection of connected computer network that consists of

interconnected network based on standardized communication protocols (TCP/IP).

The idea of Internet was first come in 1962, in order to backup the US nation’s

telephone system in case of attack. After years of research, in 1969 the ARPAnet

delivered the first Internet message using node-to-node communication between

UCLA and Stanford University [12].

2.2.1. Utilization and Rapid Growth

World Wide Web, introduced by Tim Berners Lee in 1991 [12], often known as

WWW or W3 is a system built by interlinked hypertext documents those can be

accessed via the Internet. The idea of WWW is to introduce Internet as a place

where information can be retrieved by everyone instead just for sending files.

Since the WWW was founded, people can utilize the Internet to communicate and

exchange information easily via the website.

2.2.2. Social Media According to Oxford Dictionary, Social Media is “Websites and applications that

enable user to create and share content or to do participate in social networking.”

[13] Recently, the social media has been a massive trend in the society. It has

become a place where anyone could come together and share anything from their

thought, picture, video and other multimedia content. As the result of the freedom

to create any content, many people also utilize the social media to enhance their

business such as by creating a page about their business.

11

2.2.2.1. Social Networking As defined before, social media is the media where people can communicate

with others from the contents those they uploaded. Although people often

consider social media and social networking are the same term, social

networking is a different term. The main difference between social networking

and social media is how people interact with others. While in social media the

user will create a one to many interactions. In social networking, the idea is

about creating a two-way interaction and relationship with the other user in an

online environment [14].

Recently, as the technology becoming more advance, there comes online

services such as Facebook and Twitter those are a whole package platform

which provide the features of social media and user communication style

adapted from the social networking as well. These kinds of sites and services

are what we said the integration of social media and social networking.

2.2.2.1.1. Facebook

Facebook is known as the most popular social media and social networking

sites. Founded in 2004 in the United States, Mark Zuckerberg initially

create this service exclusive for students in Harvard University and later

expanded gradually until finally it is available for worldwide [15]. This

online application has been a giant in the cyber world providing social

networking service for anyone all over the world with a condition to be at

least 13 years old.

2.2.2.1.2. Twitter

Twitter, founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone as a service that

provides microblogging activities [16]. Using its service, user can post

anything publicly or privately at the limit of 140-characters per tweet.

Twitter also provides a messaging service, which is called as Direct

Message service.

12

2.2.2.2. Social Media Functions

As discussed before, there are different kinds of services those provide social

media and social networking. However, different social media usually have

different function that makes them unique and distinguishing from the others.

There are some different types of the cyber social services such as micro-

blogging, photo sharing, music and video streaming and others.

2.2.2.2.1. Photo Sharing

According to Collins Popular English Dictionary, photo sharing is the

publishing of user’s digital photos online, thus enabling the user to share

them with others (publicly or privately) [17]. Based on its definition, photo

sharing is similar to micro blogging but, while micro blogging content focus

on text, the photo sharing focus on the digital image sharing.

2.2.2.2.2. Instagram

Instagram is one of the most popular online photo and video sharing social

networking service. This service mostly used by people that own a

smartphone and like to share their picture anytime and anywhere. Instagram

also provide digital content editing features such as photo filter to make it

easier for the user transforming the look and feel of the photo or video to

make it more interesting.

2.3. Wireless Mobile Device

As stated in the oxford dictionary, mobile device is a portable computing device such

as a smartphone or tablet computer while wireless means using radio, microwaves,

etc. (as opposed to wires or cables) to transmit signals [18]. From both definitions,

wireless mobile device can be defined as a portable computing devices those connect

to network without using wires or cables.

13

Figure 2. 3 World First Mobile Device

Looking to the history, the first wireless mobile device is the SCR 194 and 195. It is

a portable radio AM radios produced by the U.S Army Signal Corps at 1938 [19].

From the looks, the SCR 194 and 195 is similar to a big telephone and has an

antenna to retrieve the radio signal.

2.3.1. Mobile Phone

The first mobile phone brought to the public was Motorola’s DynaTAC at 1983.

This publicly available mobile phone works on AMPS network and priced at

$4000 [20].

Figure 2. 4 Motorola DynaTAC

Over the past decades, the development of the wireless mobile devices has been

very fast and the change is very big. Every year, company tries to evolve their

mobile device and adding features to the mobile device. At the 1990s, the colored

screen mobile phone was coming as a breakthrough and near the end of 90s,

Nokia with its product 7110 came as the first mobile phone featuring Wireless

Application Protocol that could be used for accessing web over a mobile network

[20].

14

2.3.1.1. Feature Phone

Ever since year 2000, the mobile phone industry keeps making innovation and

adding many features such as predictive text and camera. These mobile phones

are considered as feature phone. The difference between the feature phone and

smartphone is here, the features those the phone has are fixed and not

extendable. Even though the latest feature phone may offers a lot of built in

applications, they generally do not have the online marketplace where people

can download applications to their phone nowadays [21].

2.3.1.2. Smartphone

As the technology grows rapidly, in 2007 the mobile phone met another

revolution, which is a mobile phone with an Operating Systems as advanced as

a desktop. Pioneered by iPhone, the smartphone has a whole new concept with

the capability of a computer and equipped with several sensors to enhanced

user experience [22]. Ever since iPhone, the other manufacturers are competing

t.o create the smartphone. In 2008, HTC signed contract with Google to make

the first android phone available to public in collaboration with Google

Android project [23]. Now in 2014, smartphones are ranging from the cheapest

one until the most expensive flagship making everyone could own a

smartphone that cause people leaves feature phones.

Looking through the evolution of wireless mobile devices, this graph would

explain the changes of mobile devices from time to time.

15

Figure 2. 5 Evolution of Mobile Devices

Since the year of 2000, the use of mobile phone especially in developing nations

has increased 1700% [24]. The increasing number of users is because companies

are pouring much effort into building a cheap mobile phone to widen the range

of their market.

2.3.2. Mobile Operating Systems

Long after the evolution, the mobile phone is now a portable computer that is

even more powerful than the old desktop computer. Packed with powerful

hardware, the mobile phone now is equipped with an operating system to bring

the most advanced features those were only available on computers back then. For

16

the developers, mobile operating systems also creating a new platform where they

can develop application by utilizing the features carried out by the smartphone.

At the moment, the most popular mobile operating systems are Apple iOS and

Google’s Android OS. While iOS is a closed platform OS, Android is an open

source project that allow developers to modified and develop their project based

on the android.

2.3.2.1. iOS

iOS, firstly named iPhone Operating System, is an OS developed by Apple for

the first iPhone. The name of iPhone Operating System changed into iOS to

reflect the evolving support for other apple devices, which are iPod, iPhone

and iPad. iOS is known as a platform that provide an application store for the

user of iDevices to download software for their device.

2.3.2.2. Android OS

Android, known as the world most used mobile operating systems [25] is an

open source and Linux-based Operating Systems. The Android, led by Google

was developed by the Open Handset Alliance [26].

Figure 2. 6 Android Smartphone Market Share

From the architecture point of view, Android has stacks of different layers

where each layer consists of several components [27]. The bottom layer of

Android is the kernel layer, which is the Linux Kernel. Although this part

never interacts with developers and end users, this is important since the Linux

17

Kernel provide the function for hardware utilization such as hardware

abstraction, memory and power management.

Figure 2. 7 Android Architecture Layer

Over the Linux Kernel, there stand Android Native Libraries layer and

Runtime layer. In the native library layer, it provides a set of function for

handing different types of data such as SQLite database and media framework

for audio and video playback. On the same level as the libraries, Android

Runtime layer that includes a set of core Java libraries is located. Inside the

Runtime layer, there stand Dalvik Virtual Machine that is utilized for running

apps based on Java and optimized for low processing power. The DVM

operates the program based on the .dex files, which built from the .class file at

the time of compilation.

On the second top of the android architecture layer, there is Application

Framework layer. Android application interact directly with this block of

architecture when we are using Android functionality which are Activity

Manager, Content Providers, Telephony Managers, Location Manager and

Resource Manager. Here, the framework manages the basic function of the

android smartphone such as telephony management.

18

At the very top of the layer, there located the layer that would mostly interact

with the developers and programmers. This is the Application Layer. In the

application layer of Android OS, user applications and built in applications

such as SMS client, dialer, web browser and games are installed. For

developers, this is an important layer since this is where will their application

located. Since Android OS is an open source operating system, user can do

anything they want with the application such as replacing any existing system

application. However, there is permission that can be set for the application.

This openness toward developers has been Android strength that make many

developers would choose Android as their development platform.

2.3.3. Mobile Application

Mobile application is a computer program that is designed to be used in mobile

devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Since everything is mobile, the

distribution of the mobile application is very easy making this segment appealing

to the developers. Every month, developers are launching their applications to the

stores regardless of their quality but low quality apps would be removed from the

store if they were below Google’s qualification. This graph shows the numbers of

new applications in Google Play per month [28]

Figure 2. 9 New Android Apps per Month

By mid 2014, the data collected showing there are 1,200,000 applications

available on Google Play and the same numbers as in the Apple Store [28][29].

19

Based on the number of the applications available on the market, it is seen that the

mobile application market has became a great opportunity for startups with low

capital to enter the market and monetize their applications to gain some revenues.

This trend of mobile applications is one of the most important key factors of

mobile devices success.

2.4. Developing Environment

2.4.1. Object Oriented Programming

In the development process of the application, author will use the object

oriented design method so the application will have a modular architecture.

The author choose to use Object Oriented concept since for a large application,

it enhance efficiency and reusability so the application will be easy to be

understood for future research project.

2.4.2. Android

Android Operating System is packed with a lot of features to make the

applications interactive and interesting for the users. The android application is

developed using Java language and the applications will be sold through a store

such as Google Play

2.4.2.1. Android Development Tools

For the development aspects, Android Development Tools is an Integrated

Development Environment based on Eclipse with additional plugin

specializing to build Android Application. With the ADT extension on

Eclipse, developers are able to quickly set up Android projects with

application User Interface that is specialized for Android, able to debug the

projects and also supported to export the .apk files in order to distribute the

application.

2.4.3. Cloud Computing

When talking about data storage, what we used to know was a hard disk or SD

card but now, data could be stored in the Internet, which people often said as

cloud. When we talk about cloud computing, it is related to the online storage.

However, cloud computing is not about the online storage but about the

process of accessing the data stored in the cloud [30].

20

The presence of cloud computing has also leverage the development of mobile

application since now, even indie developers could use cloud services for their

application.

2.4.3.1. Parse

Parse.com is an online service that providing a cloud based backend for

application to enhance a development of an application. Using Parse

service, a developer is able to use database, notifications and data in the

cloud for their application without worrying about complexity in

maintaining the data in the loud.

2.4.4. Computer Vision

Erik G. Learned Miller stated, “Computer vision is the science of endowing

computers or other machines with vision, or the ability to see [31]”. This field

of computer study is focusing on giving computer or other machine a

capability to see, extract, process and analyze relevant information from an

image. With implementing computer vision, a computer is expected to have an

algorithm that could work like human eyes and brain so it could detect objects.

At present, the computer vision is used to support many tasks such as face

recognition for building security, medical analysis, automatic inspections for

machine parts, etc.

2.4.4.1. Open CV

Open CV (Open Source Computer Vision) is a programming functions

library for realtime computer vision. The computer vision supports many

programming languages such as C++, C, Phyton and Java and supports most

of the OS such as Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and Mac OS [32]. Open

CV algorithms can be utilized for many things such as face recognition,

objects identification, classify human actions, etc [33].

21

2.4.4.2. Image Recognition

Image Recognition is one form of Computer Vision utilization in order to

detect an object inside and image. With a certain algorithm, the computer

will process the picture and can find the result of what object is in the

picture.

2.4.4.2.1. Bag of Word Algorithm

Bag of Word algorithm is a popular methodology used to detect an object

inside a picture. This algorithm was first used for text revival in a text

analysis, which later adapted for computer vision application. This

algorithm detect an object inside an image using a visual analogue word

which is based on the vector quantization process by clustering low-level

visual features of local regions such or points such as color, texture and

so forth from an image [34].

Figure 2. 8 Bag of Words Process

The processes involved in the algorithm are [34]:

1. Detecting the regions/points of interest

2. Compute local descriptors over those regions/points

3. Quantize the descriptors into words to form the visual vocabulary

22

4. Find the occurences in the image of each specific word in the

vocabulary for construting the BoW feature

2.4.4.2.2. Camfind API

Camfind is an Application Programming Interface (API) that has an

ability to detect an object inside the image by sending a picture to the

API provider and waiting for the server to return the token that later will

be used to retrieve the result of image search. This algorithm could detect

many objects, also food objects so it could be used in this Thesis project.

This API is utilizing computer vision to detect an object that is sent to the

server. To expand the database and ability of their algorithm, the

company has a data center in the Philippines where there are people who

monitor the image and tagging it with the result of image search so these

results could be added as the search sample and improves the Computer

Vision learning to leverage the API performance [35]. This combination

of Computer Vision and crowdsourcing method explains how Camfind

API work and serves the API users.

23

2.5. Research Methodology

This research will be accomplished by these series of steps:

1. Current problem definition

2. Research for related materials to the research including similar works

3. Analyze similar works and existing solution for development reference

4. Designing the solution

• Determine the services those would be used

• Create the flowchart of the system

• Creating the class diagrams, use case diagrams and data flow diagrams

• Design the database

• Create the paper prototype of the User Interface to simulate User Interaction

• Designing resources for logo, icons and other drawable images for the

application.

5. Development and Implementation

• Develop the application

• Debugging the application on the real devices

• Fixing the bug and continue to develop the next module

6. Testing the solution

7. Evaluating the solution