MealLogger is one of the three most frequently used smartphone-based dietary assessment tools, according to a systematic review of digital nutrition platforms in research settings (1). The paper, published in the journal Health Psychology Review, provides a detailed overview of this technological landscape to guide scientists towards the most suitable assessment tools for their research.
Appreciating that “smartphone-based dietary assessment has become popular in health psychology and behavioral sciences to capture eating behavior in daily life”, researchers from Cambridge and other universities examined 117 publications including 129 different digital nutrition platforms. The authors noted that smartphone-based dietary assessment offers comparable validity and may actually overcome some of the limitations of traditional assessment methods. MealLogger features, including photo-based assessment, the ability to include free-text description, and the capacity to determine serving sizes, were acknowledged, and the immense potential of such technology was underscored. To quote the authors, “smartphone-based dietary assessment may advance not only nutrition epidemiology but also health psychology and public health” by providing researchers with “unprecedented opportunities to improve the understanding of the behavior itself and the precursor-behavior relationships across time, which may ultimately advance psychological theory and intervention development.”
Reference:
König LM, Van Emmenis M, Nurmi J,Kassavou A, Sutton S. Characteristics of smartphone-based dietary assessmenttools: a systematic review. Health Psychol Rev. 2021;1-25. doi:10.1080/17437199.2021.2016066