1 research outputs found
Comparison of Self-monitoring Feedback Data from Electronic Food and Nutrition Tracking Tools
Changing dietary habits and keeping food diary encourages fewer calorie
consumption, and thus weight loss. Studies have shown that people who keep food
diary are more successful in losing weight and keeping it off. However, no
study has investigated the nutritional values produced by food journaling
applications. This is crucial since keeping food diaries helps identify areas
where changes needed to help user's loss weight, based on the application
feedback. To achieve this, the provided data should be consistent among all
applications. Otherwise, this will question the effectiveness and reliability
of such tools in tracking diet and weight loss, and hence question user trust
in these applications. This study characterizes the use of 4 food journaling
applications to track user diet for 10 days (namely, MyFitnessPal, Lose It,
FatSecret, CRONOMeter). We measured variations between the output of each
application. The findings revealed an inconsistent and a variation in the
output feedback given by all the 4 tools. Although some tools provided closer
values, still their data were different and inconsistent. Moreover, some tools
were missing essential nutritional fact data, such as sugar and fiber. We
additionally compared a sample of food items common among all tools with the
Swiss Food Composition Database and checked for their consistency with the same
items in the database. The evaluation of the applications showed a gap in the
data consistency among applications and the FCD, and questions how reliable
they are for food logging and diet tracking. This study contributes to current
research in health and wellbeing and can be referenced by researchers to
provide deeper insights into the data consistency. Future work should examine
ways to provide precise output that is common among all applications, so to
guarantee the effect on weight loss