Electronic Data Capture: Evaluation and Experience of Palm Technology for Daily Diaries in Infant Nutrition Research

Meeting the needs of US dietitians for food composition data

“…Various ''short methods'' of calculating the composition of diets were developed using the average value of key nutrients among groups of foods (Clark and Cofer 1962;Leichsenring and Donelson, 1951;Wheeler et al, 1996). With the advent and continual improvement of computers and nutrition software since the late 1950s and the development and expansion of the World Wide Web (WWW) and wireless technology since the 1990s, RDs can now access, compute, and evaluate the food composition of client intakes, meal plans, or food frequency questionnaire responses (McNutt et al, this issue) faster and more easily than ever before and from locations other than the office desktop (Bodner-Montville et al, 2006;Cekola and Litov, 2006;Champagne and Allen, 2004;Hart and Kolasa, 1985;Hertzler and Hoover, 1977;McCaffree, 2001;Neighbors-Dembereckyj and Painter, 2002;Orta and Reinarts, 1994;Probst and Tapsell, 2005;Stumbo, 2007). RDs have seen the development of applications tailored for specific practice areas such as school nutrition, institutional and restaurant foodservice, food labeling, counseling, education, and clinical and epidemiological research.…”