Functionalities and input methods for recording food intake: a systematic review

Increasing healthcare costs related to lifestyle-related chronic diseases require new solutions. Research on self-management tools is expanding and many new tools are emerging. Recording food intake is a key functionality in many of these tools. Nutrition monitoring is a relevant method to gain an overview of factors influencing health. However, keeping a food diary often constitutes a challenge for a patient, and developing a user-friendly and useful electronic food diary is not straightforward.

To gain insight into the existing approaches to recording food intake, and to analyze current functionalities and input methods.

We searched digital libraries, vendor markets and social networks focusing on nutrition. Selection criteria were publications written in English, and patient-oriented tools that offered recording of food intake or nutrition. The system properties that we searched for were types of data, types of terminal, target population, and types of reports and sharing functionalities. We summarized the properties based on their frequency in the reviewed sample.

31 publications met the selection criteria. The majority of the identified food recording systems (67%) facilitated entry of food type and the consumed quantity of food; 16% of the systems were able to record more than one type of data. The three most frequent target populations were people with obesity, diabetes and overweight. Mobile phones were used as terminals in 35% of the cases, personal computers (PCs) in 29%, and personal digital assistants in 23%. Only 10% supported both PCs and mobile phones. Data sharing was provided by 71% and reports by 51% of the systems. We searched for apps in Google Play and the Apple Store and tested 45 mobile applications that stored food intake data, of which 62% supported recording of types of food, 24% recording of carbohydrate intake and 15% recording of calorie intake. The majority of the mobile applications offered some kind of reports and data sharing, mainly via All of the tested social-network-enabled applications supported access from a personal computer and a mobile phone, search in a food database, reports, graphical presentation, listing of favorite foods, overview of own meals, and entering of consumed food type and quantity.

The analyzed apps reflected a variety of approaches to recording food intake and nutrition using different terminals--mostly mobile phones (35%), followed by PCs (29%) and PDAs (23%) for older studies, designed mainly for users with obesity (45%), diabetes mellitus (42%) and overweight (32%), or people who want to stay healthy (10%). The majority of the reviewed applications (67%) offered only input of food type and quantity. All approaches (n=31), except for two, relied on manual input of data, either by typing or by selecting a food type from a database. The exceptions (n=2) used a barcode scanning function. Users of mobile phone applications were not limited to data recording, but could view their data on the screen and send it via email. The tested web applications offered similar functionalities for recording food intake. The systems studied provided some degree of personalization: users can access some systems via PCs or mobile phones and they can choose among various types of data input content for recording food intake. Many functions, such as search in a food database, reports, graphical presentation, listing of favorite foods, and overview of the user's own meals, are optimized to simplify the recording process and save time. Data sharing and reports are common features of the reviewed systems. However, none use the user's recorded food history to make suggestions on new nutritional intake, during the food recording process. This may be an area for future research.