Feasibility and Use of the Mobile Food Record for Capturing Eating Occasions among Children Ages 3–10 Years in Guam

Abstract

Children’s readiness to use technology supports the idea of children using mobile applications for dietary assessment. Our goal was to determine if children 3–10 years could successfully use the mobile food record (mFR) to capture a usable image pair or pairs. Children in Sample 1 were tasked to use the mFR to capture an image pair of one eating occasion while attending summer camp. For Sample 2, children were tasked to record all eating occasions for two consecutive days at two time periods that were two to four weeks apart. Trained analysts evaluated images. In Sample 1, 90% (57/63) captured one usable image pair. All children (63/63) returned the mFR undamaged. Sixty-two children reported: The mFR was easy to use (89%); willingness to use the mFR again (87%); and the fiducial marker easy to manage (94%). Children in Sample 2 used the mFR at least one day at Time 1 (59/63, 94%); Time 2 (49/63, 78%); and at both times (47/63, 75%). This latter group captured 6.21 ± 4.65 and 5.65 ± 3.26 mean (±SD) image pairs for Time 1 and Time 2, respectively. Results support the potential for children to independently record dietary intakes using the mFR.

Collecting wrappers, labels, and packages to enhance accuracy of food records among children 2–8 years in the Pacific region: Children’s Healthy Living Program (CHL)

“…Therefore, in future studies when giving instructions on collecting WLP, emphasis should be placed on the importance of providing these items. As an alternative to providing the bottle or package, participants could be encouraged to take digital images of the wrapper or label on the SSB (Aflague et al, 2015). …”

“…This is a burdensome task and would require high levels of motivation. To overcome this barrier in future studies, particularly in low-income groups, participants could be encouraged to take digital images of these larger wrappers/packages (Aflague et al, 2015). …”

Mobile Ecological Momentary Diet Assessment Methods for Behavioral Research: Systematic Review (Preprint)

“…A total of 10 studies described event-contingent mEMDA methods used in nutrition-related research [52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61]. Additional approach details were extracted from other related journal articles [43,[62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73].…”

The use of co-occurrence patterns in single image based food portion estimation

“…Developing methods for dietary assessment and evaluation has continued to be a challenging task. Traditional dietary assessment technique, such as dietary record, requires individuals to keep detailed written reports for 3–7 days of all food or drink consumed [1, 2], hence it is a time consuming and tedious process. With smartphone quickly gaining popularity in the recent years, the use of smartphones can provide a unique mechanism for collecting dietary information of users.…”