Objective and Subjective Meal Registration via a Smartphone Application

SPLENDID is a research programme that develops a novel preventive intervention for young people at risk for obesity and eating disorders. The SPLENDID app, a novel smartphone application that mediates the monitoring and modification of the participants’ eating and activity behaviors, resides in the intervention’s core. The app receives and manages eating and physical activity related signals from three communicating sensors as well as subjective user input. In this paper, we present two discrete meal registration mechanisms – subjective and objective – that have been implemented and incorporated in the SPLENDID app, along with the relevant user feedback. In objective meal registration, the app records meal information with the help of a portable food weight scale, while an electronic meal report is employed for the subjective registration. Certain components of the proposed registration mechanisms and the relevant feedback have been evaluated with respect to usability on forty young adolescents, yielding promising results.