The Use of Mobile Devices in Aiding Dietary Assessment and Evaluation

Abstract

There is a growing concern about chronic diseases and other health problems related to diet including obesity and cancer. The need to accurately measure diet (what foods a person consumes) becomes imperative. Dietary intake provides valuable insights for mounting intervention programs for prevention of chronic diseases. Measuring accurate dietary intake is considered to be an open research problem in the nutrition and health fields. In this paper, we describe a novel mobile telephone food record that will provide an accurate account of daily food and nutrient intake. Our approach includes the use of image analysis tools for identification and quantification of food that is consumed at a meal. Images obtained before and after foods are eaten are used to estimate the amount and type of food consumed. The mobile device provides a unique vehicle for collecting dietary information that reduces the burden on respondents that are obtained using more classical approaches for dietary assessment. We describe our approach to image analysis that includes the segmentation of food items, features used to identify foods, a method for automatic portion estimation, and our overall system architecture for collecting the food intake information.

A New Method for Measuring Meal Intake in Humans via Automated Wrist Motion Tracking

“…Some researchers have suggested using automated image processing instead of a human post-reviewer to determine the amount of food consumed (Saeik and Takeda 2005; Takeda et al 2003; Zhu et al 2008). This has been demonstrated on a small set of foods (Zhu et al 2010), but the foods were carefully separated and the background was carefully controlled. Some studies have shown that people prefer the camera approach to traditional pen and paper food records (Boushey et al 2009; Six et al 2010).…”

Guide and Position of the International Society of Nutrigenetics/Nutrigenomics on Personalized Nutrition: Part 2 - Ethics, Challenges and Endeavors of Precision Nutrition

“…The Technology Assisted Dietary Assessment (TADA) project [35] provides a mobile phone application (Mobile Phone Food Record) to assist in the assessment of dietary intake [36], which provides personal nutritional recommendations to individuals based on their nutrient intake [37]. …”

Food image analysis: The big data problem you can eat!

“…We have developed a system, known as the Technology Assisted Dietary Assessment System (TADA), to acquire and process food images [6, 4, 7]. The TADA system and the associated mobile Food Record (mFR) mobile application allows users to acquire food images using a mobile telephone (see Figure 1).…”