Using low-cost sensing to support nutritional awareness

Abstract

Nutrition has a big impact on health, including major dis- eases such as heart disease, osteoporosis, and cancer. This paper presents an application designed to help people keep track of the nutrional content of foods they have eaten. Our work uses shopping receipts to generate suggestions about healthier food items that could help to supplement missing nutrients. We present our system design: a capture and access application that, based on shopping receipt data, provides access to am- biguous suggestions for more nutritious purchases. We also report re- sults from one formative user study suggesting that receipts may provide enough information to extend our work by also estimating what people are actually eating, as opposed to simply what they are purchasing.