Harnessing and creating new technology to gain understanding of young adults’ nutrition

Abstract

Food journaling is important for individuals and nutrition researchers. Food journaling is very tedious and challenging to do accurately. This thesis explores how to improve this based on both simple and detailed food journaling. These represent two extremes in terms of user effort and detail in the logging. To tackle the challenge of detailed food journaling, we designed a mobile food logging app, Eat and Track (EaT). This multi-disciplinary research was in conjunction with a public health research project where young adults used EaT to track their food intake. The core research challenge was to explore how to support searching for food in a large food database (6,274 foods) on a small mobile phone screen. This work began with the design of an innovative approach to the food search, based on the 100 most frequently eaten foods. This design was refined in formative studies. Then we designed a new approach for the systematic study of the use, usability and effectiveness of EaT, especially its search interface. This was based on collaboration with nutritionists in a large field trial (N=1,027). The key contributions are the design and evaluation of the Search-Accelerator to facilitate searching for food in a large food database and our systematic evaluation process. To tackle the challenges of simple journaling, we explored the use of the mobile phone lock screen and designed the ultra-lite lock screen logger, Food InTake logger (FIT), for tracking vegetable intake. Our 4-week field study (N=19) revealed that it is quick and easy to use. The study led to a key conceptual contribution in the definition of the notion of lock screen ambience. The study demonstrated that most people found FIT to be an ambient reminder to eat vegetables and track vegetable intake. The key contributions are the definition of lock screen ambience to help people maintain awareness of an important goal, and the exploration of the lock screen to help people to do simple food logging