Instruments to assess food intake and dietary habits are used in a variety of research settings. Examples of such instruments include: (1) food frequency questionnaires, in which individuals are asked to report their normal intake frequency for specific foods over a certain time period; (2) 24-hour recalls, in which individuals report a detailed listing of all food and drink they have consumed over the previous 24 hours; and (3) dietary records in which individuals record their food intake over several days. Self-reported dietary assessment instruments have been used successfully for research and in public health settings; however, each method has drawbacks and limitations concerning the amount of information obtained and the quality of the data used to provide nutrient or food group estimates. The project proposed herein involves the development of a cost-effective, stand-alone, portable (i.e., cellular phone-based), unobtrusive dietary assessment device that can be made available to consumers and researchers throughout the United States to record dietary activity over an arbitrary time frame of the end-user or researcher's choosing. The Nutrilog system will allow users to rapidly and accurately record their food intake at the point of consumption through an intuitive, menu-driven graphical interface that exploits a unique nutritional database design, mitigating many of the errors inherent to self-reporting.
