Nutrition monitor: A food purchase and consumption monitoring mobile system

Abstract

The challenge of monitoring food intake can be facilitated by the truly transformational power of mobile phones. Mobile phones provide a pervasive and fairly ubiquitous infrastructure, which we leverage to provide cost-effective, high quality aids to behavior monitoring and modification. Additionally, the technology allows public health messages to reach certain target groups, such as youth and members of low-income communities, which may not otherwise be practical. Our system leverages the existing mobile phone infrastructure. We use the highly capable computational and data-gathering platform of mobile phones to facilitate the collection, transmission and processing of data for purposes of monitoring in the field, behavior and activity classification, and timely behavioral cuing. The nature of mobile phones coupled with a web-interface also allow for customization and personalization, retrieval of nutrition information on demand, as well as the ability to truly monitor the user's consumption trends. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010.