Abstract
Established methods for nutritional assessment suffer from a number of important limitations. Diaries are burdensome to complete, food frequency questionnaires only capture average food intake, and both suffer from difficulties in self estimation of portion size and biases resulting from misreporting. Online and app versions of these methods have been developed, but issues with misreporting and portion size estimation remain. New methods utilizing passive data capture are required that address reporting bias, extend timescales for data collection, and transform what is possible for measuring habitual intakes. Digital and sensing technologies are enabling the development of innovative and transformative new methods in this area that will provide a better understanding of eating behavior and associations with health. In this article we describe how wrist-worn wearables, on-body cameras, and body-mounted biosensors can be used to capture data about when, what, and how much people eat and drink. We illustrate how these new techniques can be integrated to provide complete solutions for the passive, objective assessment of a wide range of traditional dietary factors, as well as novel measures of eating architecture, within person variation in intakes, and food/nutrient combinations within meals. We also discuss some of the challenges these new approaches will bring.
Highlights
Non-communicable diseases account for almost three quarters of global mortality, with cardiovascular disease (CVD) being the leading cause of death
We offer an overview of the state of the art in the use of sensor and wearable technology for dietary assessment that covers both established and emerging methods, and which has a particular focus on passive methods—those that require little or ideally no effort from participants
In this article we briefly looked at how emerging digital and sensing technologies are enabling new objective assessments of dietary intake
Summary
Non-communicable diseases account for almost three quarters of global mortality, with cardiovascular disease (CVD) being the leading cause of death. Studies of infant interactions with environments and parents have used pin-on camera devices that are widely available online as novelty “spy badges” [37, 38] These devices have many characteristics that make them ideal for capturing images of meals; their small form and light weight mean they can be worn on the body, and their low cost facilitates use at scale. High levels of performance have been reported with this approach, with one study reporting an area under the curve for chewing detection (in a combination of laboratory and free-living tests) of 0.97 [55] It does require the sensors be manually attached to the head every time the glasses are worn. The latency between start of meal and detection would need to be determined, and meal detection algorithms evaluated
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