Meal - a menu evaluation system with symbolic icons in mobile devices

While cooking is a daily activity in our life, many family cooks feel bothered by deciding the menu each and every time because of being required to cook both tasty as well as well-balanced meals for their families. We have been developing a meal recording system, MEAL (Menu Evaluation and Attribute Log), which supports those cooks by easily managing and retrieving meal records on mobile platforms. MEAL displays automatically generated icons as composed representations of information based on food data, so users can easily identify each data item on a small screen. The interface has two main views, a retrieval view and an analyzing view for food records in the user's own food database. The retrieval view displays retrieval results with photos of food and symbolic icons. The analysis view supports visualizing all sets of food data represented by icons. It allows users to easily understand their cooking habits for their family. Since the information gets optimized, the symbolic icons lead to higher visibility on small screens.