The only problem with Nutricalc was that it needed to be updated constantly. Preparations and formulas would change, forcing me to keep up. My father would deliver the mathematical formulas as a constantly-changing Word document. Here’s the formula to calculate the protein intake:

U = 1/A x (D x 0.0087 + E x 0.0087 + F x 0.0174 + G x 0.0174 + M x (I/100+O x 0.16/100) + N x (K/100 + O x 0.16/100) + P x 0.023 + Q x 0.019 + R x 0.015 + S x 0.012)

I had to manually make sense of the new formula, comparing it to the old one, and make the required changes. Needless to say, this was a time-consuming and slow process.

Computer programmers don’t enjoy tedium, so I set out to put myself out of my misery. I wanted my father to make the required changes himself and just send me a new text file with the formulas when changes needed to be made. I would then ask a computer program I wrote to turn the text file into an app. By 2004, I had programmed myself out of the app creation process.

It dawned on us that the software I had written could be used not just for a nutritional calculator, but also for any number-crunching calculator app. I unimaginatively named the app creation software I had written Calcapp.

My father next set his sights on creating a drug dosage calculator. While two adults are often prescribed the same drug dosage even if one person weighs twice as much as the other person, you need better precision when administering drugs to premature babies weighing as little as half a kilogram (18 ounces). Doing the required calculations manually was, again, error-prone and tedious, meaning that his department immediately took a liking to our new app. Pharmacalc was born.

Calcapp was created partly because we were expecting to create lots of Nutricalc and Pharmacalc variations. Every hospital department would need a unique copy, as they used different nutrients, different drugs and had procedures that differed. We envisioned selling our apps all over Sweden. (Before moving on to conquer the rest of the world, obviously.)

Our lofty ambitions soon faced resistance in the form of constrained hospital budgets. What we were offered wouldn’t even cover our costs for updating the software.

We found our savior in industry. A maker of breast milk fortifiers and formula was interested in acquiring an unlimited Nutricalc license in Sweden and in neighboring countries. Their Nutricalc variant would only have data for their products, but would be distributed to hospitals for free.

In 2007, we had our deal and the first Nutricalc CDs were distributed to hospitals.