MyDietCam: Development and usability study of a food recognition integrated dietary monitoring smartphone application

BACKGROUND: Diet monitoring has been linked with improved eating habits and positive health outcomes such as prevention of obesity. However, this is often unsustainable as traditional methods place a high burden on both participants and researchers through pen and paper recordings and manual nutrient coding respectively. The digitisation of dietary monitoring has greatly reduced these barriers. This paper proposes a diet application with a novel food recognition feature with a usability study conducted in the real world.

METHODS: This study describes the development of a mobile diet application (MyDietCam) targeted at healthy Malaysian adults. Focus group discussions (FGD) were carried out among dietitians and potential users to determine ideal features in a diet application. Thirty participants were recruited from a local university to log their meals through MyDietCam for six days and submit the Malay mHealth Application Usability Questionnaire (M-MAUQ) at the end of the study.

RESULTS: The findings from the FGD led to the implementation of the main features: individualised recommendations, food logging through food recognition to reduce steps for data entry and provide detailed nutrient analyses through visuals. An average overall usability score of 5.13 out of a maximum of seven was reported from the M-MAUQ which is considered acceptable.

CONCLUSION: The development of a local (Malaysian) mobile diet application with acceptable usability may be helpful in sustaining the diet monitoring habit to improve health outcomes. Future work should focus on improving the issues raised before testing the effectiveness of the application for improving health outcomes.