Exploring Challenges in Automated Just-In-Time Adaptive Food Choice Interventions

A healthy diet lowers the risk of developing diseases like diabetes, obesity and different types of cancers and cardiovascular conditions. Persuasive systems have already shown promise in changing user's nutrition through the strategy of monitoring and retrospectively visualizing (bad) eating behavior. In contrast emerged the idea of systems proactively offering help before such behavior even occurs, i.e. before a food choice has been made. Recent advances within the sensor-enrichment of smartphones and wearable technologies have made it possible to develop new behavior change intervention techniques, such as Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAI). Within this work, we discuss challenges towards technology-supported, completely automated JITAIs to support healthy food choices. We derive the challenges based on existing literature, and discuss future research opportunities that would benefit users towards achieving a healthier eating behavior.