Abstract
Accurate dietary assessment is crucial for both the prevention and treatment of nutrition-related diseases. Since mobile-based dietary assessment solutions are promising, we sought to examine the acceptability of “Nutrition and Diet” (ND) apps by Healthcare Professionals (HCP), explore their preferences on apps’ features and identify predictors of acceptance. A 23 question survey was developed by an interdisciplinary team and pilot-tested. The survey was completed by 1001 HCP from 73 countries and 6 continents. The HCP (dietitians: 833, doctors: 75, nurses: 62, other: 31/females: 847, males: 150, neither: 4) had a mean age (SD) of 34.4 (10.2) years and mean job experience in years (SD): 7.7 (8.2). There were 45.5% who have recommended ND apps to their clients/patients. Of those who have not yet recommended an app, 22.5% do not know of their existence. Important criteria for selecting an app were ease of use (87.1%), apps being free of charge (72.6%) and validated (69%). Significant barriers were the use of inaccurate food composition database (52%), lack of local food composition database support (48.2%) and tech-savviness (43.3%). Although the adoption of smartphones is growing and mobile health research is advancing, there is room for improvement in the recommendation of ND apps by HCP.
Highlights
The prevention and treatment of diet-related diseases is a pressing issue of global concern
Stage 1—Drafting of the survey: The preliminary questions were developed by the members of the “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Health and Nutrition Laboratory” of the University of Bern after reviewing literature on surveys conducted using health/diet apps and on the innovative technologies that have been proposed for dietary assessment
We found that Healthcare Professionals (HCP) most frequently use the following arguments for not selecting such an app: the displayed food compositions are inaccurate; local food composition is not supported; people who use the app need to possess a certain level of technical expertise; the app is not personalised in terms of language/units; the nutrient estimation is incorrect
Summary
The prevention and treatment of diet-related diseases is a pressing issue of global concern. With an accurate assessment of dietary consumption and eating behaviour it should be possible to prevent and treat many nutrition-related diseases and to maintain balanced eating patterns. As part of the dietary assessment process, healthcare professionals seek to assess people’s dietary patterns to suggest corrective actions. Understanding and recording what, and when people eat, fundamentally depends on accurate dietary assessment tools, and mobile health (mHealth) technology holds great promise as an approach [1]. It is estimated that more than five billion people worldwide own mobile devices, and more than half of these are smartphones [2]. Mobile-assisted approaches for dietary monitoring may reduce costs related to execution time and involvement of experts and more
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