A Novel Automated Participant-Recorded Dietary Data Collection Method Using Low-Cost Mobile Phones and Interactive...

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Nutrition Science
• Mobile Health (mHealth)

Background:

• Dietary data gaps hinder effective food policy design in low- and middle-income countries.
• Automated mobile phone tools offer a resource-efficient alternative to face-to-face methods for dietary data collection.
• High-frequency dietary quality monitoring is crucial in resource-constrained environments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the validity of automated participant-recorded dietary data using interactive voice response (IVR) on basic mobile phones.
• To evaluate dietary quality among rural women in a sub-Saharan African context.
• To compare IVR data against same-day gold standard observed weighed food records.

Main Methods:

• Automated IVR collected 24-hour dietary recalls using push-button responses from 156 rural Ugandan women.
• Inter-method agreement was assessed using Weighted Cohen's kappa, Bland-Altman plots, and Wilcoxon signed-rank test.
• Agreement for minimum dietary diversity scores (MDD-W) and consumption of unhealthy foods/beverages was tested using Cohen's kappa and McNemar's test.

Main Results:

• Most women (74.4%) completed the IVR, with completion linked to network coverage and prior mobile phone experience.
• Moderate agreement was found for IVR compared to weighed records for minimum dietary diversity scores (MDD-W) (kappa=0.48).
• Fair to moderate agreement was observed for mean women's dietary diversity scores (WDDS) (kappa=0.39) and unhealthy food/beverage consumption (kappa=0.43-0.44).

Conclusions:

• IVR via basic mobile phones shows potential for collecting dietary data from low-literate women in rural settings.
• This method can estimate population-level dietary diversity and unhealthy food consumption.
• IVR is suitable for high-frequency monitoring of sentinel groups, with potential for adaptation to other contexts.