Mobile Senior Health in Personalized Dietary Planning and Smart Intake Feedback

With the fact that older population continues to grow up, the economic load upon their care and treatment is getting heavily. Thereby, the concept of healthy aging is becoming more and more important. Among the many facts affecting healthy aging, a balanced dietary intake and nutrition are the major ones in physical and cognitive wellbeing, in which more innovative inputs on related service and products are expected. Due to the increasing number in owning smartphones, as well as some positive clinical evidences on lifestyle change and diet management in use of smartphone, the idea of using smartphones as a healthy aging platform have its potential. Developing diet related applications in smartphone has at least the following challenges, i.e., difference in nutritional needs, difference in eating habit, and the decline of physical and cognitive capability that affects the app usability. Therefore, the future development of related innovations should focus on usability, adherence and scalability to improve the reach and effectiveness. In this project, we particularly focus on meeting each individual’s personal nutritional need, providing real time dietary feedback, and design a senior friendly interface under a user-center design process. This project will focus on elderly centric design to develop personal dietary management and intelligent dietary feedback system. The project divides into two years, one year in system development and another year in evaluation. In the first year, the team will focus on system development. The key function is to allow to meet individual needs on dietary planning and management, as well as to provide real time dietary intake feedback based on the input of experts, e.g., dietitians. A user-centered design process will be used. Within the process, key methods include empathy maps, storyboards, process flows, and prototypes under an iterative framework. The evaluation will include expert’s heuristic judgement and pre-test of lead users. In the second, we will select some testing fields to allow target groups to describe various types and sizes of foods to see the factors on usability, including duration in operation, trial frequency in try and error, subject opinion, and questionnaire. This project belongs to healthcare design for elderly domain. An interdisciplinary team have been organized to enhance previous research results. Further research after this project will be expanded to include clinical trials for a certain target groups. It is expected to develop such tool with convenient and efficient interface and to reach for the goal of healthy aging.

Project ID:PB10608-2398
External Project ID:MOST106-2221-E182-042-MY2