Nutrition-Related Mobile Application for Daily Dietary Self-Monitoring

Abstract

Nutrition apps for mobile devices such as smartphones are becoming more widely available. They can help ease the arduous chore of documenting intake for nutritional assessment and self-monitoring. This allows people to control food intake, support their participation in physical activities, and promote a healthy lifestyle. However, there remains a lack of research regarding systematic analysis mapping studies in this area. The objective of this study is to identify dietary self-monitoring implementation strategies on a mobile application. This study analyzed 205 journals from the Scopus database using the descriptive-analytic method. The records used in this exploration study were those released between 2007 and 2021 that were collected based on the keywords “dietary self-monitoring,” or “nutrition application,” or “nutrition apps,” and “calorie application.” Data analysis was conducted using the VOSviewer and NVivo software analytical tools. The results show that research studies on dietary self-monitoring increased in 2017. Results also indicated that the country that contributed the most to this topic was China. The study on mobile applications for dietary self-monitoring revealed seven clusters of dominant themes: attitude to improved dietary behaviors, parameters for disease diagnosis, noncommunicable diseases, methods, nutrition algorithms, mobile health applications, and body mass index. This study also analyzed research trends by year. The current research trends are about dietary self-monitoring using a mobile application that can upgrade people’s lifestyles, enable real-time meal recording and the convenience of automatically calculating the calorie content of foods consumed, and potentially improve the delivery of health behavior modification interventions to large groups of people. The researchers summarized the recent advances in dietary self-monitoring research to shed light on their research frontier, trends, and hot topics through bibliometric analysis and network visualization. These findings may provide valuable guidance for future research and perspectives in this rapidly developing field.