Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Apr 5, 2022
Date Accepted: Jul 14, 2022
Smartphone-apps designed to reduce food waste, improve healthy eating and financial expenses: A cross-over pilot-intervention trial studying students’ user experiences.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Global sustainability and individual health needs coordinated attention. While individuals are recommended a healthy diet to reduce the burden of non-communicable diseases, global attention to natural resource conservation are also needed. The latter specifically means effective measures to reduce food waste.
Objective:
In this study we evaluate the experiences by students and effect from using smartphone apps designed to reduce food waste on personal healthy eating, financial expenses and food waste.
Methods:
Six students from different study programs, of mean (Std) age 24.7 (2.9), were recruited to evaluate two different apps designed to reduce food waste for two consecutively months, and to register food consumption, food waste and financial food expenses before and after the app trials. Results were registered and analysed by mixed methods.
Results:
Food waste awareness increased after app-trials, but did not result in measurable effects (i.e. no change in food waste, healthy eating or personal food expenses). Experiences pointed towards too many manual operations in the apps to induce permanent use, services more concerned about the producers interests than the individual’s needs, and the lack of a composite app which includes functions to promote healthy eating, overview of budget and expenses, and of food waste.
Conclusions:
Apps may aid in increased awareness of food waste reduction at producer and consumer level. Large-scale studies with longer duration are needed to see if apps may induce measurable changes in food waste, healthy eating and financial expenses. Clinical Trial: Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research, 3rd of April 2021, id-number 832471
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.