Current dietary assessment methods are time-consuming, costly, and due to manual input, prone to major errors in measurement. In addition, they do not provide real-time feedback. Smartphone apps, through advancements in AI, algorithms, and hardware are increasingly being introduced for dietary monitoring, using food or beverage multimedia data as input and generate almost instant nutrient content output.
The AI in Health and Nutrition lab at the ARTORG reviewed 22 different smartphone-based systems and divided these into three categories: laboratory (12), preclinical (7), and clinical (3). The team found a number of open research questions and technical challenges to be addressed and end users – including health care professionals and patients – need to be involved in the app design and development. Importantly, there is a clear need for these systems to be validated under unconstrained real-life conditions and for their performance to be compared against conventional methods for dietary assessment.
