International cutting-edge research to help find easier ways to assess what people eat.
Excessive cost and the need for accuracy limit the routine collection of information on dietary intake. Technology-assisted dietary assessment mitigates this cost.
The ACE-TADA research team are looking to find easier ways to assess what people eat using technology. Information on what people are eating, either at population or individual level is essential to understanding how people’s diet may be associated with health and well-being. Current methods of dietary assessment are either time-consuming to record or rely on participant memory for recalling what they eat.
Researchers, policy makers, dietitians and nutritionists study what people eat and drink, both to help individuals monitor their health and to investigate the dietary patterns of populations and how these with patterns compare with those recommended in dietary guidelines.
To insure high quality and contemporary dietary data, technological advances using images and automated methods provide new approaches to address issues of accuracy, participant burden and cost.
The aim of this project is to discover the drivers underpinning accuracy of dietary intake reporting and consumer preferences for technology-assisted dietary assessment methods for use in population surveillance.
The ACE-TADA project compared three leading methods of technology-assisted dietary assessment. Excessive cost and the need for accuracy limit the routine collection of information on dietary intakes which, undermines decision making related to public health nutrition policy in Australia.
Three technology-assisted methods of assessing diet were compared. The outcomes of this project will lead to more accurate and acceptable methods to assess dietary intake to inform effective government decision making about the types, amounts and drivers of food consumption of the population.
The “Accuracy and cost-effectiveness of technology-assisted dietary assessment (ACE-TADA)” study is being conducted by a team of researchers from Curtin University, University of Newcastle, University of Hawaii Cancer Center and Purdue University.
Professor Deborah Kerr from Curtin University leads the research team. Deb is the research dietitian at Curtin University who has a particular interest in new technologies to assess what people eat and to help them improve the quality of their diet.
Professor Clare Collins is a dietitian who leads the nutrition research at Newcastle University, NSW. She has won many awards for her research (including the AO this year). Her research focuses on personal nutrition technology and the impact of diet on chronic disease at all stages in life.
Professor Barbara Mullan is a health psychologist and most of her research is focused on designing new ways to change behaviours related to nutrition, health and lifestyle
Dr Megan Rollo is a dietitian and lecturer at Curtin University. She is an expert in the use of technology in diet and behaviour for research.
A/Professor Richard Norman is a health economist at Curtin University. His research interests include evaluating the cost of healthcare and the importance of the value of quality-of-life care.
Professor Satvinder Dhaliwal is a statistician and an expert in biostatistics and health research. He works with universities around the word and specialises in the development of clinical prediction models in medical research.
Dr Fengqing Maggie Zhu is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Maggie’s research interests include smart health with a focus on image based dietary assessment and wearable sensor data analysis, visual coding for machines, and application-driven visual data analytics.
Dr Tracy McCaffrey is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food at Monash University. Tracy’s research has evolved from dietary assessment and consumer understanding of portion size to the use of marketing techniques to improve health professional’s ability to communicate on social media to form the Monash Digital Nutrition Lab
Associate Professor Christina Pollard is a dietitian at Curtin University with over 30 years’ experience working with government to improve nutrition. Christina designed and led the Gofor2&5® fruit and veg campaign and now leads the Act Belong Commit® campaign for mental wellbeing.
Associate Professor Sharon Kirkpatrick is a Registered Dietitian at the University of Waterloo with training in community and public health nutrition. Much of Sharon’s work is aimed at improving methodologies for measuring dietary patterns to foster robust evidence on how these patterns influence human and planetary health and how to promote healthy and sustainable eating practices.
Paul Atyeo is a health statistician at the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Janelle Healy is a doctoral student at Curtin University and a dietitian who is examining user feedback on dietary assessment methods.
Clare Whitton is a doctoral student and public health nutritionist examining reporting error in dietary assessment.
This animation is a free education resource aimed at inspiring the next generation of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and SHAPE (social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy) experts. It can be used at home or in the classroom alongside the downloadable article and activity sheet.
The article, podcast, animation and activity sheet were produced by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEM), and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE). www.futurumcareers.com
Curtin University Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) has approved this study (HREC number HRE-2019-0222)
This research study is funded by the Australian Research Council.