Topstory, School of Computer Science: FoodCoach

Topstory School of Computer Science

FoodCoach

Fighting illnesses with FoodCoach

The research project FoodCoach, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, is exploring the question as to how people can obtain information about foodstuffs better with the help of technologies. Inter alia, the app is intended to help reduce diet-related illnesses.

FoodCoach is an interdisciplinary research project pursued by the University of St.Gallen together with Halla University in South Korea. The researchers’ interest focuses on possibilities of automating dietary interventions in order to prevent widespread modern diseases such as diabetes and obesity. In a nutshell, this is about evaluating for the benefit of consumers the shopping data that are already being collected by retailers. The aim is the presentation of recommendations for a healthy, balanced diet which can be made available with the help of an app. In contrast to cumbersome solutions, which are often based on the manual recording of all meals, new technological approaches will automatically provide participants with a better overview of their dietary behaviour and with tips for a permanent change in their eating habits – without ever having to record one single meal. FoodCoach has become possible thanks to a modernisation of data protection legislation: ever since 2018, Europeans have been able to retrieve their personal data for further digital processing.

Avatars help people to buy healthier foodstuffs

The FoodCoach research project explores issues from various areas of science. The four-strong research team is correspondingly diverse. Prof. Dr. Simon Mayer is a computer scientist and heads the Chair of Interaction- and Communication-based Systems at the Institute of Computer Science (ICS-HSG), at which Jing Wu is writing her doctoral thesis about this topic and is primarily dealing with the technical interfaces and interventions. Prof. Dr. Tanja Schneider is a digital sociologist and runs the Department of Technology Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Science (SHSS-HSG). In parallel with the technical development and implementation, she and her team are pursuing an ancillary sociological research angle which investigates users’ experiences, as well as non-users’ reservations regarding digital diet monitoring, and integrates the insights thus gained into the main research project. The FoodCoach project is based on the ideas and the nutritional value database from the

doctoral thesis written by Dr. Klaus Fuchs of ETH Zurich, who co-initiated the project.

The researchers launched the four-year project two years ago. In this period of time, they conducted a twelve-week study entitled FutureMe together with Dr. Annette Mönninghoff from the Institute for Customer Insight (ICIHSG). For this purpose, they recruited smartphone users who live in Switzerland and use at least one of the two leading Swiss foodstuff customer cards. “Our primary objective was to explore the effects of an mHealth intervention on people’s physical activities and foodstuff purchasing behaviour,” Simon Mayer explains. Jing Wu adds: “Unhealthy dietary behaviour and physical inactivity contribute to the increase in non-communicable diseases and to increasing costs in the health sector. Preventive measures in the field of mobile health may cause this trend to be reversed.” Individual avatars which provide users with a window into a future that may be possible if they retain their current habits have resulted in behav-

Photo shooting in the HSG cafeteria to demonstrate FoodCoach: Prof. Dr. Simon Mayer, Dr. Annette Mönninghoff and Jing Wu.

ioural change in related fields. Initial conclusions revealed that mHealth interventions make an improvement in physical activity and foodstuff purchasing behaviour feasible. However, a high-performance randomised-controlled study with a larger number of subjects would be required to confirm this provisional evidence.

Personalised e-coaching for a healthy diet

The project generated a further study, DietCoach, which is being conducted in cooperation with the Department of Diabetology, Endocrinology, Nutrition Medicine and Metabolism of Berne University Hospital headed by Prof. Dr. Lia Bally (endocrinologist and nutrition medicine expert) and with Melanie Stoll (nutritional scientist). DietCoach focuses on the provision of personalised nutrition counselling by means of an automated evaluation of purchasing data. This study is supported by the Swiss Heart Foundation. data, which are fed back to patients by way of personalised goals. After the intervention, changes in purchasing behaviour in comparison with the beginning will be examined,” adds Simon Mayer. Unhealthy eating habits are an essential risk factor for the genesis and progress of cardio-metabolic disorders. A change in dietary behaviour could have a substantial influence on the risk and disease burden. “A platform for individual foodstuff purchasing behaviour provides an enormous potential for the reduction of cardio-metabolic morbidity and mortality and could have a nationwide and international scale effect.”

“The Inselspital provides the specialists in nutrition medicine and nutrition counselling and conducts the clinical evaluation in patients with metabolic disorders. We provide the infrastructure required to process these patients’ data,” explains Jing Wu.

In the study, the research team examines the efficacy of this e-health approach in clinical practice. Participants are patients of the Department of Diabetes, Endocrinology, Nutrition Medicine and Cardiology. “They discuss their foodstuff purchasing and eating habits, and now also their purchasing data, in personal meetings with their nutrition counsellors. The corresponding recommendations according to individualised medical objectives are recorded by our systems,” is how Jing Wu describes the course of action.

“In a next step, the intention is to automatically derive reliable dietary recommendations on the basis of these

FoodCoach triggers off a wealth of new insights

According to Simon Mayer, FoodCoach primarily provides a new tool for recording individuals’ dietary behaviour and for making low-cost nutrition counselling available to the general

public. “There’s an interest in this both by people in good health who want to prevent diseases and by patients with cardio-metabolic problems. The health sector will profit because this free service will enable it to save financial resources.”

In addition, the research project resulted in a wealth of insight and foundations which will be useful for further projects. By way of keywords, the HSG professor adduces real-time behaviour nudging with regard to the purchase of problematic products – offline through mixed reality interventions or online through the client-side change of web contents. Through one of these off-shoot projects, the research team joined a research group headed by Prof. Dr. Verena Tiefenbeck at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen and published articles in several journals which deal with the improvement of customer decisions in web-based e-commerce.

“The DietCoach provides an enormous potential for the reduction of cardio- metabolic morbidity and mortality.”

“Today, it’s completely up to the owners of online platforms what information they want to disclose about their products. Conversely, we show how product transparency in online shops can be improved by a mutual accumulation of dealer websites – similarly to Ad Blocker, except that we add information instead of blocking advertisements,” Simon Mayer emphasises. “Additionally, we’re discussing the technical and legal feasibility of such changes and demonstrate that this has the potential to improve customers’ decision-making.”