Ifood: Development and usability study of a social media-based applet for dietary monitoring

Abstract

Background Dietary monitoring is critical to maintaining human health. Social media platforms are widely used for daily recording and communication for individuals’ diets and activities. The textual content shared on social media offers valuable resources for dietary monitoring. Objective This study aims to describe the development of iFood, an applet providing personal dietary monitoring based on social media content, and validate its usability, which will enable efficient personal dietary monitoring. Methods The process of the development and validation of iFood is divided into four steps: Diet datasets construction, diet record and analysis, diet monitoring applet design, and diet monitoring applet usability assessment. The diet datasets were constructed with the data collected from Weibo, Meishijie, and diet guidelines, which will be used as the basic knowledge for further model training in the phase of diet record and analysis. Then, the friendly user interface was designed to link users with backend functions. Finally, the applet was deployed as a WeChat applet and 10 users from the Beijing Union Medical College have been recruited to validate the usability of iFood. Results Three dietary datasets, including User Visual-Textual Dataset, Dietary Information Expansion Dataset, and Diet Recipe Dataset have been constructed. The performance of 4 models for recognizing diet and fusing unimodality data was 40.43%(dictionary-based model), 18.45%(rule-based model), 59.95%(Inception-ResNet-v2), and 51.38% (K-nearest neighbor), respectively. Furthermore, we have designed a user-friendly interface for the iFood applet and conducted a usability assessment, which resulted in an above-average usability score. Conclusions iFood is effective for managing individual dietary behaviors through its seamless integration with social media data. This study suggests that future products could utilize social media data to promote healthy lifestyles.