Abstract
Due to the physical, psychological, or socioeconomic changes that accompany aging, many people will be affected by geriatric frailty syndrome, which can lead to multimorbidity and premature death. Nutrition counseling is often used to prevent and intervene in frailty syndrome, especially in geriatric rehabilitation. To this end, the consumption behavior of geriatric patients is recorded using paper-based, as well as retrospective memory logs in face-to-face interviews between patients and nutritionists. To simplify this procedure, a digital nutrition diary was developed that is specially adapted to the needs of geriatric patients (>=70 years), enabling them to record their consumption behavior themselves. In an initial study (Study 1), conducted in a geriatric rehabilitation division with twelve subjects (ten male, two female, mean age 79.2 years), feedback about the usability of the digital nutrition diary, and how to improve it, was surveyed. In addition, the usability of an activity tracker and a body composition scale was surveyed to determine whether geriatric patients are generally able to use these devices. In a second study (Study 2), also conducted in the geriatric rehabilitation division, this time with sixteen subjects (ten male, six female, mean age 79.3 years), the usability of the digital nutrition diary was surveyed again to evaluate its modifications based on the feedback from Study 1. In Study 1, the usability rating of the system (0–100) was 82.5 for the activity tracker, 29.71 for the body composition scale, and 51.66 initially for the digital nutrition diary, which increased to 76.41 in Study 2.
Highlights
Most industrialized societies are currently undergoing a process referred to as “demographic change”
This study demonstrated that geriatric patients at high risk of frailty syndrome are able, from a usability perspective, to independently log their consumption behavior with the help of a digital nutrition diary (DNDv2)
This study showed that commercially available sensor technologies exist that can be used by most geriatric patients, with the exception of the evaluated body composition scale, which could provide DNDv2 with additional data in the future
Summary
Most industrialized societies are currently undergoing a process referred to as “demographic change”. Geriatric frailty syndrome, which is expected to affect 25% to 50% of all people over 85 years of age [3] and is often associated with malnutrition [4], should not be underestimated. The DiDiER project [5] addressed this issue by exploring how to establish digitalized nutrition counseling services for groups of people at an increased risk of malnutrition. One of the project’s use cases focused on supporting nutrition counseling for people affected by frailty syndrome. The goal was to improve the quality and the quantity of data for nutrition counseling, while reducing the workload of traditional retrospective and paper-based data acquisition methods for nutritionists and patients. The content described in this article is based on work conducted in the context of the DiDiER project [6]
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