New scientific publication

Publication BigO

A new scientific publication on the use of a smartphone app for monitoring dietary habits in the journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth. The paper is titled, “Formative Evaluation of a Smartphone App for Monitoring Daily Meal Distribution and Food Selection in Adolescents: Acceptability and Usability Study”.

This study aimed to evaluate a newly developed mHealth system used to monitor dietary habits of adolescents in real life, as a first step in the development of a self-monitoring and lifestyle management system against adolescent obesity. The developed system employed a smartphone to collect data from a smartphone app and two additional sensors. The smartphone app allowed participants to self-report eating events throughout the day. In addition, two sensor modules enabled collection of additional objective eating behavior data. Participants used the smartphone app for 2-3 weeks to objectively collect their dietary habits. The histogram above depicts the meal distribution of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks across the day for all registered meals.

The study assessed acceptability, usability and the constraints of the app. The evaluation of the system existed of two levels. That is, by subjective self-reports by users and by objective compliance estimations of the study protocol. From an infrastructural and functional perspective, system use was feasible in the current context. Moreover, the smartphone app appears to have high acceptability and usability. To conclude, this study shows that the system appears promising as a method to provide real-life dietary habit measurements. When interested, you can read the full article here.