Your Healthy App Ideas

Your Healthy App Ideas
Posted by Kori Schulman on March 11, 2010 at 06:03 PM EST

Yesterday USDA and First Lady Michelle Obama announced the Apps for Healthy Kids competition – part of Mrs. Obama’s Let’s Move! Campaign to raise a healthier generation of kids. The contest challenges developers to create innovative, fun and engaging tools and games that encourage children to make more nutritious food choices and be more physically active.

To get the ball rolling, The White House and GOOD asked “What kind of healthy kid app would you like to see developed?” on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Here are some of our favorite responses:

From our Facebook fans:
John Allan: A pedometer app for the iPhone that yells at you to get off the couch if you don't get enough steps in per day?

Lindsay Hattaway: An app that let's kids track the type of activity they participated in and the time spent on it each day. Make it a race to be on top against other friends who have the app.

Robbin Burnett Webb: An app such as the "video game" where you are able to cook your own food, using your own ingredients. Kids need to learn how to cook with healthy, fresh ingredients. A lot of parents can't teach them how, because they don't know themselves. Get the kids interested in the kitchen! (from good)

From our fellow Twitterers:
ieatreal: GPS kid-mapping of "wild zones" in their "playborhood" @GOOD Q: What Healthy Kid App wld u like developed? cc @WhiteHouse @ChildrenNature

freshnewengland: @whitehouse re: food app - a visual that shows healthy vs. unhealthy portion sizes, links to farms & farmers markets by zipcode; bike maps

And from our LinkedIn group:
Jim Taylor: As a parent of 3 young children, I would love to see an APP that would calculate various nutritional values simply by scanning the bar codes of the product. Smart phones read bar codes, and by attaching the FDA Nutritional information, a family could scan in all the items they consumed in 1 Hour, or 1 Day, or 1 Week. Suggestions could be given to the family for things like alternative or healthier substitutions, how much exercise they need to do to be fit on the registered diet, links to more information relating to the topic, etc. You could also have things like allergies be quickly ascertained.

Learn more about the challenge at HealthyKidApps.com and check out a recent blog post by Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack.

Stay connected to the White House on facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for upcoming questions.

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