Diogo Branco, Sérgio Alves, Hugo Simão, Ana Gomes, Ana C. Pires, Maria Barroso, J. Sousa, Luis A. M. Barros, T. Guerreiro
{"title":"24-hour recall for parent-reporting of children’s food intake","authors":"Diogo Branco, Sérgio Alves, Hugo Simão, Ana Gomes, Ana C. Pires, Maria Barroso, J. Sousa, Luis A. M. Barros, T. Guerreiro","doi":"10.4108/eai.6-12-2021.2314450","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Recently, we have witnessed an emergence of digital behaviour change applications, particularly in the areas of fitness and nutrition. Digital platforms promise several benefits over their paper-based counterparts, particularly in collecting information from users and in the personalized delivery of notifications and contents. One crucial aspect for nutritional behaviour change is capturing the user’s food intake, which is normally achieved through 24-hour food recall, i.e., reporting everything people ingest. Past instruments have focused on self-reporting, mostly performed by adults. In this work, we co-designed, within a team of computer scientists, dietists, psychologists, and parents, how the latter could report their children’s food intake through an application. One particular challenge of third-party reporting is having an incomplete picture or not being fully available to report when intake is taking place. Another challenge was how to report food intake quantities. We decided to go with an already validated approach that measures food portions using children’s hands. Different food had different ways of reporting, e.g., fruits and vegetables were reported using fists and handfuls. After an iterative process, we created a standard for each portion. Parents had to choose between full, three quarters, half, and one-quarter of a portion. We evaluated our prototype in a preliminary study (4 weeks free-living usage, with logging, plus interview) with 5 parents. We found a constant need to reduce the burden (even more than when self-reporting), allow more flexibility, and simplify the steps for parents while reporting their children’s food intake. Parents highlighted the difficulty to fill in the report in the requested time. From those insights, we decided to reduce the number of days to report, allow extra opportunities to continue within the program, improve the tutorial for portions and how to measure them, and allow parents to decide the day of reporting.","PeriodicalId":257991,"journal":{"name":"Abstracts from the 15th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, PervasiveHealth 2021, 6 December 2021, Tel Aviv, Izrael","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Abstracts from the 15th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, PervasiveHealth 2021, 6 December 2021, Tel Aviv, Izrael","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.4108/eai.6-12-2021.2314450","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Recently, we have witnessed an emergence of digital behaviour change applications, particularly in the areas of fitness and nutrition. Digital platforms promise several benefits over their paper-based counterparts, particularly in collecting information from users and in the personalized delivery of notifications and contents. One crucial aspect for nutritional behaviour change is capturing the user’s food intake, which is normally achieved through 24-hour food recall, i.e., reporting everything people ingest. Past instruments have focused on self-reporting, mostly performed by adults. In this work, we co-designed, within a team of computer scientists, dietists, psychologists, and parents, how the latter could report their children’s food intake through an application. One particular challenge of third-party reporting is having an incomplete picture or not being fully available to report when intake is taking place. Another challenge was how to report food intake quantities. We decided to go with an already validated approach that measures food portions using children’s hands. Different food had different ways of reporting, e.g., fruits and vegetables were reported using fists and handfuls. After an iterative process, we created a standard for each portion. Parents had to choose between full, three quarters, half, and one-quarter of a portion. We evaluated our prototype in a preliminary study (4 weeks free-living usage, with logging, plus interview) with 5 parents. We found a constant need to reduce the burden (even more than when self-reporting), allow more flexibility, and simplify the steps for parents while reporting their children’s food intake. Parents highlighted the difficulty to fill in the report in the requested time. From those insights, we decided to reduce the number of days to report, allow extra opportunities to continue within the program, improve the tutorial for portions and how to measure them, and allow parents to decide the day of reporting.