The Use of New Technology in Dietary Assessment
Dietary intake assessment is a very important instrument for assessing nutrition-related disease risks and evaluating the effectiveness of public health interventions. The most commonly used tools for dietary intake assessment are food records or diaries, 24-hour dietary recalls (24-HDRs), food frequency questionnaires (FFQs), weight records, and brief dietary assessment instruments (1).
The conventional tools have their own limitations that affect data collection and weaken the research conclusions. Therefore, new technology tools have been recently developed for improving food intake measures that provide assessments with less effort for both researcher and participant and have faster application for use in epidemiological studies. All new dietary assessments are classified into groups according to technological similarities:
i.
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Web-based technology
Self-administered retrospective web-based dietary assessments allow for the data to be collected at a time and location that is convenient for the study participants, and they are similarly processed in real-time to previous technologies, but in contrast, the web-based technology has the advantage of assessing either short- or long-term dietary intake. This tool includes much programming by various software components (e.g., interactive help features, flexible images of portion sizes, audio functions, videos, and data-quality checks) and a high level of detail in dietary data (i.e., FFQs, 24-HDRs, and food records) (2).
One famous web-based dietary assessment tool is the Automated Self-Administered 24-hour (ASA24) Dietary Assessment Tool created by the National Cancer Institute. The ASA24 tool is for use on adults. It is automatically coded and includes the five steps of the Automated Multiple Pass Method. It uses food images to aid in reporting the type and amount of foods that are consumed (2,7).
iv. Scan- and sensor-based