NASA ISS Intake Tracker App
Luis Millan
UX Designer
Researcher
Systems Engineer
Johnson Space Center
NASA's existing ISS intake tracking system needed improvement. Topcoder, a crowdsourcing software company, contributed by creating an engaging iPad app for astronauts to track dietary intake in space.
Multiple unique challenges were present at the moment of working on this project. First of all, the environment: noise, lack of light, microgravity (tablet wouldn’t detect its orientation or up/down face position, food could be floating, among others).
The origin of the food affected the way data was going to be processed, coming from the US and Russia, with different barcodes and nomenclature.
After a series of crowdsourcing competitions, the community members created an iPad app that helps astronauts provide an accurate and quick method for tracking their dietary intake, while also tracking important nutrient data.
Food can be logged and tracked through image recognition, voice, barcode scanning, as well as manual entry.
In my personal experience while researching and designing the core systems of the application, I tested several open-source and private solutions, providing documented proof and features comparison to select the frameworks that best suit the needs of the project. I decided to select flexible frameworks as a baseline while modifying them to fit the overall system architecture needs. I made sure to deliver proper documentation and ready-to-use components to developers.
