Explore Computer Vision based journaling to drive healthy behaviours and tackle the progression of chronic diseases.

Smart Health coLAB organised by Padang & Co bring healthcare professionals, technologists, startups, data scientists, and community to explore new use cases and address changes in demographics and lifestyles, particularly in areas of rising concern such as obesity and chronic diseases, and care for seniors.

The coLAB ended with the Smart Health Hack on Saturday (16 May 2015) with 11 different ideas pitched to the judges and the audience. The judging team consisted of Balaji Venkatesan (Zuellig Pharma), Julien de Salaberry (The Propell Group and Eddy Chan (Kimberly-Clark).

The Brief

Self-monitoring food intake using Food Journal is one of the most recommended tools to improve diet and weight loss. Recent years have seen significant food journal adoption using mobile apps which offers richer information and accessibility relative to traditional paper methods.

Nevertheless, food logging is not easy and few individuals are able to sustain the self-monitoring practice for an appropriate length of time for reliable food entry despite various features provided.

In fact, it may unintentionally results in behaviors contrary to their goals due to simplicity of entering data such as prepackaged than home cooked food. Finally, social stigma and features incorporated into the application may undermine efforts of journaling (Cordeiro, et al).

Smart Health coLAB is organized to explore how data, tech and innovative services can drive healthy behaviours and help manage chronic diseases. Highlighting the importance and current challenges of Food Journaling, Zuellig Pharma sponsored a challenge to identify new opportunities to improve food journaling design and technology with following question: How can we use technology or develop appropriate nudges so that people learn and make changes to their diets to their achieve goals? What can we do to make the necessary changes and stick to them?

The proposed idea should help increase awareness of food intake, identify opportunities for improvement to achieve maximum impact and succeed with minimal changes, and finally sustain the improvement by tracking progress and momentum.

Idea: Project Stickers

Making food journaling a stickier habit

We propose a blended food journaling system which bring journaling activities into both physical and digital realms. We incorporate stickers and activity sheets as fun and interactive way for capturing food intakes and promote conversation with family members to support and sustain development of healthy habits. Through the use of Image Recognition technology, we are able to capture, process and analyze such data digitally. This allows us to track progress and recommend pro-active measures to achieve health goals.

Result

Project Stickers was awarded Zuellig Pharma Switch Challenge Prize.

Presentation and Highlight Reel from UP Singapore.