Using QR Codes to Improve Mobile Wellness Applications

In recent years several mobile applications for wellness and weight management have been developed. These applications can promote healthier lifestyles by helping people to track food and calorie intake. A major drawback of mobile wellness applications is that they rely on manual data entries to capture the required information. This is still complicated for many people due to the miniature keyboards used in most mobile devices. In this paper we propose the use of QR codes to capture nutritional information instead of doing manual entries. We also describe a prototype application called calReader developed using the Android Platform.