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I spent a lot of time and energy in this project. With version 0.5, I registered a new domain babygrowthchart.org and signed up a new virtual hosting to host the application. Also you will notice that the nice chart has a "Flex Data Visualization Trial" in the middle. To remove this text, I need to purchase a full version of Flex builder with charting support which costs $700. If you find it helpful and want to support me on this project, please feel free to send in any email, leave feedback or click on button below. 
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News
Summary
Every visit to the pediatrician's office, the nurse measured Derrick's length, weight and head circumference and added the data to a piece of paper as well as the "standard" us baby growth chart. I love the idea of having a growth chart handy where parents can have an idea how well the baby's growth is compare to the other babies at the same age. Knowing that can help parents to find out whether the baby is gaining enough food, nutrition and sleep to gain weight and height.
However, there are some issues with the baby growth chart that pediatrician uses in US. For example,
- Reading the graph is hard, there are so many lines intersect together and so close to each other, which makes it hard to read the right value.
- Also it's hard to tell which percentile the baby is in, mainly because it's a normal distribution and the middle point between 50 percentile and 75 percentile doesn't mean it's 67.5 percentile. While this is what computer is good at, knowing it's a normal distribution, it's easy to write a program to calculate the percentile which is accurate enough.
- Baby growth chart in US was from some test that was done a long time ago in US. However, there are a lot of babies from different countries and culture makes the US baby growth chart inaccurate.
I have been playing with Flex lately, which has many features to make it a perfect candidate to write such a baby growth chart application as a RIA (Rich Internet Application). Fortunately, I found that WHO (World Health Organization http://www.who.org
) launched a new set of Baby Growth Chart Standards
on APRIL 27, 2006
.
27 APRIL 2006 | GENEVA – New international Child Growth Standards for infants and young children released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) provide evidence and guidance for the first time about how every child in the world should grow.
WHO released a lot of detailed data behind the charts including a day to day distribution for 5 years!!! The goal of this project is to demonstrate that an RIA (Rich Internet Application) is a perfect fit in this case to not only manipulate large data sets (more than 1800 days of data) as well as some very interesting and interactive features to bring baby growth chart to another level. 
Goal
Use Adobe Flex technology to implement the most dynamic, accurate and feature rich baby growth chart. I have seen many issues with all the available baby growth chart
- Inaccurate
- Babies on breast feeding and formula are two different categories. The first 3 month babies on breast feeding grow faster than babies on formula, while on 3-12 months babies on formula take the lead.
- Not each measurement can be done on exactly the same day of the month, usually it's +/- a few days
- Data point on the print out chart doesn't reveal a good approximation of the baby's percentile mathematically
- Babies in different race and country should be in different categories
- Hard to Share
- Most of the graph are on paper, you have to scan it and post it if you want to share it with other people
Features
- Support WHO (World Health Organization
) baby growth charts
Weight for Age
(Version 0.1)
Length/Height for Age
(Version 0.1)
Head Circumference for Age
(Version 0.1)
- Weight for Length/Height
- BMI (Body Mass Index) for Age
Different theme for boy and girl
(Version 0.1)
Save data on server side
(Version 0.5)
- Fetch data from server by entering username and password
Fetch data from server by specifying baby's name and DOB
(Version 0.5)
- Save data as XML to client's machine
- Allow client load saved XML data to server
- Multiple babies per account and show all of selected ones on chart
Support both Metric unit and English Unit
(Version 0.5)
- Support dynamically adding data points
Calculate exact percentile for each user data point (should be doable)
(Version 0.5)
Customize x/y axis labels
(Version 0.5)
A scroll bar for user to zoom in/out certain data range
(Version 0.5)
Customize data tooltip format
(Version 0.5)
- Support US baby growth charts
- Support categories for countries
- Support categories for different races
- i18n
Resources
nice work!!
-- atao