History
Welcome to HealthAtHand. Before we get started, let me give you a bit of history about the program. My name is Michael Simpson and a while back, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. I tried numerous diets and visited several nutritionists, but it became very apparent I had to take control of my health myself.
As a diabetic, your diet becomes the most important factor in controlling your blood sugar. This is also true of other types of diseases, such as hypoglycemia, obesity, heart disease, and just about any thing that has to do with your health.
I started to keep written log books and diaries, but they suffered from a couple of drawbacks. For one, it takes time to enter the data and you had to carry books around to help you retrieve the nutrition values needed for the logs.
As a programmer, I thought to myself that there had to be a better way. But I was not going to carry a laptop computer around. I also didn't want to have to run to my desk top computer every time I ate something.
A friend of mine had a Pocket PC and suggested that I look into creating a program to run on one of these. After several months of research, development, and testing, "HealthAtHand" was born.
Features
HealthAtHand will allow you to record your food consumption and track the following nutrition values.
Navigation
The HealthAtHand system consists of six primary panels. You can switch to any panel at any time using the navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen.
The Shopping list is a simple database that allows you to add a name for an item to pick up the next time you visit the supper market. Each panel has the ability to add the name of an item in its database.
This button will load this help file. Each panel also has a button in the upper right hand corner that will load a help file for that particular panel..
This is your food diary. This is where you will create and track daily meals and ingredients.
This panel is used to create recipes for your favorite dishes and beverages.
This is where all the common food items that you eat on a regular basis are stored.
Full USDA item database. You will find over 10,700 items here.
A unique weight-based USDA database. Use this database when creating recipes and when adding weighted items to the various other databases
You can copy any item in any database to any other database. This is true of all databases except the USDA databases. These are read only and can not be added to.
Settings
There are various options you may want to change from time to time.
Sound
This will turn off and on all the sound for the program.
Auto PID
When enabled anytime one of the entry fields has focus the SIP/PID will pop up. If you have a pocket PC with a built in keyboard you may want to disable this option.
Auto Caps
Some of the entry fields will capitalize each word you enter. You may want to disable this from time to time to manually control this.
Key Clicks
When sound is turned on a click will be heard each time you enter a character into one of the entry fields. If you don't wont to hear key clicks use this option to turn off the key clicks.
Closing thoughts
After using HealthAtHand for only 2 months my doctor could not believe my blood sugar and cholesterol results. With this program you truly have your health at hand.