User:Islandsword/sandbox

Bon'App, Inc. is a social enterprise in Cambridge, MA founded by Laurent Adamowicz, a 2011 Senior Fellow of the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. The mission of Bon'App is to empower communities to achieve healthier lifestyles through personalized nutrition guidance. Bon'App is an open platform that includes applications for Apple mobile devices, products, Android phones, and a website. The application identifies food and tailors recommendations to users based on their health profile, food allergies, food intolerances, and preferences; it then provides nutrition information based on a user's profile. The Bon'App integrated platform provides an interface where the food industry and the healthcare industry interact with the Bon'App users with a goal of changing eating behavior and making food healthier.

History
The concept of Bon'App emerged in 2009 when Laurent Adamowicz, a serial entrepreneur and former food industry executive, dreamed of a "food-sniffing phone" while writing a thesis on the socio-cultural anthropology of food at Columbia University in the City of New York. Previously Chairman and CEO of Fauchon, a leading Paris-based luxury food company that he grew in both product and global reach with 650 food stores and restaurants in 34 countries, Adamowicz also served on the board of several not-for-profit organizations, the Supervisory board of Van Cleef & Arpels, as Managing Director of Banque Paribas and Rothschild & Cie Banque, and a Group Product Manager at Beatrice Foods. Laurent earned a BA from ESCP-Europe in Paris, France, an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and acquired an MA in socio-cultural anthropology from Columbia University. He is currently a 2011 Senior Fellow at Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative.

Key Dates

The Company
Board of Advisors A team of highly knowledgeable and experienced professionals has played an integral role in the formulation and development of Bon'App:
 * Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Chair and Director of the Advanced Leadership Initiative of Harvard University.
 * Dr. George L. Blackburn, the S. Daniel Abraham Associate Professor of Nutrition and Associate Director of the Division of Nutrition at Harvard Medical School; Chief of the Nutritional/Metabolism Laboratory, Director of the Center for the Study of Nutrition Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
 * Barry Bloom, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and the Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health; former Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.
 * Frank Moss, former Director, MIT Media Lab; Professor of the Practice of Media Arts and Sciences; the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology.
 * Ted A. Mayer, Assistant Vice President of Harvard University Hospitality and Dining Services.

A for-profit social enterprise, Bon'App, Inc. is a C corporation, incorporated in Delaware on May 15, 2010; Bon'App, the trademark, was registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on May 15, 2010.

By Fall 2011, Bon'App, Inc. has grown to five full-time employees and approximately 60 students from MIT, Boston University, and Harvard University working as Data Input Associates to gather restaurant menu data for Bon'App proprietary database of food items and ingredients.

Product
Bon'App is an open platform across multiple mobile operating systems and a website. The platform allows Bon'App users the ability to track their food intake, and receive meal options tailored to their specific health profile, food allergies, intolerances, and food preferences. The other functions of the platform allow (i) the food industry to interface with the Bon'App database by inputting individual restaurant menus and ingredients for the benefit of users, and (ii) the healthcare industry to have access to their patients to track in real time their food intake (with the individual authorization of the patients.)

Mobile Application "Bon'App is a free app for the iPhone that will tell you in plain language what your food contains and how healthy it is for you, based on your own food preferences, food allergies, and dietary goals." The mobile application side of the Bon'App platform has two major functions:
 * 1) Search for food and meals based on a personalized health profile and location.
 * 2) Identify food nutrition facts and determining their impact, based on a user’s health profile.

The Bon'App database comprises over 35,000 food items with over 300,000 ingredients and coverage of over 95,000 school cafeterias and restaurant locations in the United States.

Search for Food Bon'App allow end-users to create a user account with name, email, health profile, and zip code. The mobile app users are able to search for food items around the location specified by either the embedded GPS of the phone or a manually entered zip code or street address. Bon'App gives the user the option to search for food items, restaurants, stores, or vending machines in a customizable radius. The results display both a list and an interactive map on the mobile phone.

There are two ways to search for food with Bon’App. Searching for a specific food item for instance "chicken" through "Search for Food" results in all the restaurants and cafeterias or dining halls in the area that provide meals with that ingredient or item. Searching with "Food Near Me" returns restaurant and cafeteria menus in the area with the options that match the user’s profile. Searching can also be performed by leveraging an embedded speech-recognition software. As detailed in the Boston Globe: "Just say 'pizza' to see a list of local restaurants offering that food, as well as nutritional details on the dishes they offer."

Bon’App also allows for the ability to perform a multi-profile search with other Bon'App users using a "Dine with Friends" function. The search is an aggregation of the health profiles of the users who want to eat together. The outcome is an interactive map that takes into account the profile of each diner.

Nutrition Impact BostInnovation explains: "The app will also provide a list of nutritional facts so you have the choice of picking the healthiest option." Using restaurant provided nutrition facts and the FatSecret database, Bon'App gives nutrition information for meals and individual food items, and then shows the impact they would have on a user's daily goals. Bon'App provides the nutrition information for both the restaurant meals and recipes or food items eaten at home. Searching for individual food items or creating a personal recipe produces nutrition impacts (calories, sugar, salt, fat, fiber, and protein.) Bon'App also shows nutrition information and impact for restaurant meals where available.

Bon'App uses the concept of a battery to show impact. Batteries for Calories, Sugar, Salt and "Yuk Fat" (combination of saturated fat and trans fat) deplete as users eat to indicate they are nearing their personal daily limit as recommended by the USDA and reset by the user's doctor or dietician. Each day, these batteries start green at 100%, turn yellow as users consume anything during the day, and then red as they deplete to warn that the user is approaching his or her daily limit. Going over a daily limit causes the batteries to turn grey, then black. Batteries for Fiber and Protein charge up to reach daily goals, changing color from red to green as the user meets his or her daily goals.

Depleting Batteries: Calories, Sugar, Salt, "Yuk Fat" Charging Batteries: Fiber, Protein

Website The website portion of the Bon'App platform is a hosted Structure Query Language (SQL) database with a dynamic HyperText Markup Language (HTML) interface. The website side of the platform has four major functions:
 * 1) Provide Bon'App users a web experience comparable to the phone application. A user who does not own an iPhone or an Android phone is still able to use all Bon'App features on the website.
 * 2) Provide the healthcare industry clients access to individual health profiles of the users who have specifically selected and authorized to share their profile, and send messages directly to the end-users of the Bon'App mobile app.
 * 3) Provide food industry clients a means to input their menu directly into the Bon'App database and gain insight into aggregate food selection data of the Bon'App users, how often users select competitors' food items, with what types of nutrients, and at what price point.
 * 4) Provide Bon'App administrators the ability to add new food entries and determine the level of healthiness of the food entered in the proprietary Bon'App database.

Besides the ability to interact with the website interface, the healthcare and food industry clients also have access of the Bon'App platform from their phones and iPads.

An Open Platform The application allows a user to designate a health practitioner (nutritionist, doctor, or dietitian) and receive health profile goals in near real-time from their health provider. For privacy, the mobile application uses a secure Internet connection to send and receive messages. Bon'App also gives a record of past consumption as a food diary that can be accessed by both user and designated nutritionist. Food industry partners can directly interact with the Bon'App database and input their location, menus and nutrition information. Food industry partners are also able to see individual dish competitive reports.

Software Architecture Bon'App employs open source license code as the coding base. To support the launch of the Bon'App platform beta pilot, the initial software programming was subcontracted in an effort to establish a base version of the application. The speech-recognition feature is developed based upon Dragon Mobile SDK, licensed by Nuance Communications.

Further Development
2nd Generation: Bon'App Global Reach In addition to the current Apple and Android software platforms, Bon'App will expand the scope of the nutritionist tool by developing the application for the low-tech mobile phones so it can reach low-income, minority, and low English literacy communities by offering its free application to any voice and text-based phone in different languages. With over 90% of the world's population having access to a mobile phone and a growing mobile application market, an expansion to the low-tech platform will provide nutrition information and the ability to manage a healthy lifestyle for users globally, no matter what kind of cell phone they utilize.

3rd Generation: Bon'App Technological Leap In the 3rd generation design, the Bon'App mobile product aims to include a molecular electronic sensor that will essentially "smell" the food and automatically identify the food and its chemical structure, its macronutrients, and even the origin of its ingredients. Bon'App plans to enable the capability of recognizing volatile organic compounds and other chemical signatures to identify foods. The advancement in technology makes food nutrition information directly accessible to people without relying on food producers' provision. The Bon'App team is working with academic institutions, government agencies, and commercial entities to carry out this plan.

Other research initiatives include plans to begin clinical studies on behavior change (public health) for high school students, diabetic patients, and post-surgery patients.