Rethinking the Mobile Food Journal

Abstract

Food choices are among the most frequent and important health decisions in everyday life, but remain notoriously difficult to capture. This work examines opportunities for lightweight photo-based capture in mobile food journals. We first report on a survey of 257 people, examining how they define healthy eating, their experiences and challenges with existing food journaling methods, and their ability to interpret nutritional information that can be captured in a food journal. We then report on interviews and a field study with 27 participants using a lightweight, photo-based food journal for between 4 to 8 weeks. We discuss mismatches between motivations and current designs, challenges of current approaches to food journaling, and opportunities for photos as an alternative to the pervasive but often inappropriate emphasis on quantitative tracking in mobile food journals.

Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking

“…Congruent with the rise of consumer health technologies, HCI research has increasingly examined the use of personal informatics tools [2] involving physical activity [27,30], food intake [15,16], sleeping behaviour [52], productivity [13], mental wellness [34], menstrual cycles [23], disease progression [3] and care-giving [63]. Rooksby et al [15] characterise these self-tracking practices as 'lived' -enmeshed in everyday life -and identify overlapping selftracking styles, such as documentary tracking and diagnostic tracking.…”

“…Rooksby et al [15] characterise these self-tracking practices as 'lived' -enmeshed in everyday life -and identify overlapping selftracking styles, such as documentary tracking and diagnostic tracking. While Elsden et al [19] have provided a design perspective on documentary tracking, highlighting self-expression and remembering, Karkar et al [32] have examined diagnostic tracking in the context of detecting individualised food triggers in irritable bowel syndrome.…”

Online Self-Tracking Groups to Increase Fruit and Vegetable Intake: A Small-Scale Study on Mechanisms of Group Effect on Behavior Change

“…Recent automated food recognition technologies rely on wearable cameras or phones to capture food photos and leverage computer vision techniques to analyze food ingredients [65,66]. Another alternative method is to use an in-the-moment photo as a lightweight food journal to reduce user effort [67]. Future research should consider these more advanced self-tracking methods to reduce participation attrition as well as increase the accuracy and usefulness of self-tracked information.…”

Eat & Tell

“…Despite the increasing ease of tracking one own's data, continued engagement with self-tracking technology is not likely to persist long term unless the issues of individual motivation, incentives, and habit formation are also addressed. Recent findings [6,8] have revealed that a vast number self-tracking technology adopters eventually lost their interest in self-tracking over time, leading to reduced compliance and increased abandonment rate. Many users tended to use the self-tracking data for short-term goals and migration between tools was fairly common [28].…”

“…To promote continued engagement with self-tracking health technologies, various financial and non-financial incentive designs have been proposed. For example, the designs of self-tracking applications can be improved by providing more meaningful behavioral insights from the data [6,8] and improving social sharing to support observational learning [6]. In the context of randomized health intervention trials, financial incentives have been commonly used to motivate health behavior changes and promote self-tracking compliance [15,25].…”