Campus Digest

Chinese medicine students receive funding to build healthy food ordering platform

01 Nov 2019

A team of students from the HKBU School of Chinese Medicine (SCM) recently received a grant of HK$100,000 from the Cyberport Creative Micro Fund to develop the existing Traditional Chinese Medicine Food Digital Assistant (TCMFDA) website into a healthy food ordering platform.

According to the team’s advisor Dr Zhang Shiping, Associate Professor of the Teaching and Research Division of SCM, the website was built in 2017 by one of his postgraduate students together with some SCM undergraduate students who had received support from a number of Chinese medicine practitioners at the School. The objective of the website is to provide personalised TCM-based dietary information which leverages the integration of artificial intelligence with health informatics and big data.

“Although the website was previously launched as a prototype, it has quickly gained a lot of positive feedback from users in Hong Kong, mainland China, the UK, US and Canada,” said Dr Zhang. 

This summer, a group of students from SCM, the HKBU School of Business, and the Food Science and Technology programme of Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College formed a start-up team to turn the concept of the website into a business. The team is planning to collaborate with catering groups to develop a personalised food ordering platform. The business plan won the support of the Cyberport Creative Micro Fund.