We are a small team of Support Workers based in Lambeth, UK who care for an individual with Autism, learning difficulties and complex communication, and have been doing so for the past 17 years. Our main goal is to ensure our client receives adequate day to day support to maintain wellbeing and live out a fulfilling life by providing opportunities to develop as a person and connect with communities. The ultimate goal is to enable our client to live a more independent life. If we get a great idea from our experience, our ethos is to share it with others in order to help them too.
Meal Planner App
Managing the diet for an individual with learning difficulties can be challenging, especially working out suitable choices that they like, ensuring the choices are part of a balanced diet and conveying what a balanced diet looks like effectively to the individual non verbally. This type of exercise also has the aim to empower the individual to choose their own meals and encourage independent but informed decision making.
Currently this is done using a paper based approach and presents issues.You will need a large collection of laminated paper food symbols that keep up with the ever changing items in the cupboards. It’s inconvenient using real items as that means the individual is routing through cupboards, which can be a safety risk, leave a mess and not suitable with certain items out of reach.
We therefore would like to develop a meal planner app available for desktop computers, which provides individuals with learning disabilities a means of choosing their own meals and educate them on healthy balanced choices when doing so. And for carers / families it will mean they can manage this seamlessly for the first time without the need to print, laminate etc or entertain other practices.
The app has already been designed and we now require a developer to bring it to life. And once built, it will be primarily tested on our client, but will be available for free to all families and organisations across the UK to use too. It’s purposely kept simple so that anyone can pick up and manage it and / pull in their own symbols library.
Time frame
Development, testing and launch of this project to be completed (TBC)
Preferred technology, platform & technical constraints
UWP application for Windows 10 – C++, C#, Microsoft Visual Basic, and JavaScript, HTML5
Project managed in JIRA
More information on the application
It has been designed with simplicity in mind. It’s not intended to be a comprehensive diet tracker which is text or data driven. It will be a simple visual drag n drop image exercise which the individual & carer / family member can use each day to communicate, negotiate and plan all meals during the day. There will be an option to save previous choices too and they can both refer back to them which means they can start to build up a collection of meals, which wouldn’t have been possible without extensive effort to photograph the paper sheet each time.
Full designs and assets will be provided along with a briefing, specification document / ongoing guidance and a weekly catch up. Please see the attachment for a design preview.
An indication of skills, experience, and availability you expect from the ideal volunteer
Experience with developing Windows UWP apps and can provide examples of work demonstrating the core functionality mentioned above, or equivalent skills
Strong communication skills
Can work remotely and reachable during UK daytime hours
Available to work on this with completion in mind over the next 4 weeks
A passion for helping individuals in need
Willing to work as a team, and proactive in their work ethic
Supporting you
We are committed to this project and will be assisting you throughout. Your main point of contact is Jack who has prior experience as a Digital Project Manager. He will be on hand to brief this project, assist with any questions, provide design assets and help out with QA testing. You will join him for a weekly catchup to touch base and review progress.
We are also looking to develop an Activity Calendar too if you are interested in that also.
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