Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Dec 19, 2022
Date Accepted: Jun 5, 2023
The Use of a Decision Support System (MyFood) to Assess Dietary Intake Among Free-Living Elderly in Norway: Evaluation Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Malnutrition is common among the elderly aged 65 years and older, posing a need for tools to assess nutritional status in this group. MyFood is a decision support system to prevent and treat malnutrition.
Objective:
This study aimed to evaluate the MyFood app’s ability to estimate the intake of energy, protein, and fluids, and food and beverage items among free-living elderly ≥ 65 years, primarily at an individual level and secondary at a group level. Additionally, the aim was to measure the elderly’s experiences using the app.
Methods:
Two 24-hour recalls were used as a reference method to evaluate the dietary assessment function in the MyFood app. Participants recorded their dietary intake in MyFood for four days. At the individual level, intake was evaluated by comparing two days of recorded intake in MyFood with intake reported in the two corresponding recalls. At the group level, the mean of all four recording days was compared to the mean of the two recalls. Differences in estimations of energy, protein, fluid, and food groups were analyzed. A short questionnaire was used to measure the elderly’s experiences with the app.
Results:
The study included 35 free-living elderly residing in Norway. About half of the participants had ≥ 80% agreement between MyFood and the 24-hour recalls for energy intake on both days. For protein and fluids, about 60% of the participants had ≥ 80% agreement on the first comparison day. Dinner was the meal with the lowest agreement between the methods, both at individual and group level. MyFood tended to underestimate the intake of energy, protein, fluid, and food items both at individual and group level. All participants found the app easy to use.
Conclusions:
The results showed that the MyFood app tended to underestimate the participants’ dietary intake compared to the 24-hour recalls both at individual and group level. The app was well accepted among the study participants and may be a useful tool among free-living elderly given that the users are provided follow-up and support in how to record their dietary intake.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.