Journal of Food, Nutrition and Population Health Open Access

Does healthy food promotion possible with an app?

2^nd EuroSciCon Conference on Food Technology

May 14-16, 2018 Rome, Italy

P Gurviez, M Besson and D Blumenthal

UMR GENIAL, France Institut Mines-Telecom, France

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Food Nutr Popul Health

Abstract:

We question how connected devices could provide an effective method to promote healthy food.  Whereas the literature on healthy-diet programs based on the use of connected device(s) include numerous surveys, nearly all studies reported a decrease in program usage throughout the intervention period. Behavioural changes have been observed in a certain amount of studies but small and on short periods, conclusions remaining rather unclear. Moreover most studies concentrated on extrinsic factors and hardly took into account intrinsic factors such as participants’ motivations and barriers to engaging themselves in a long term healthy diet program. We conducted a qualitative research with 4 focus-groups (27 participants) to explore the motivations and barriers which strengthen or threaten the effectiveness of a digital device targeting a healthier diet. We targeted both men and women having tried to lose weight in the last 5 years. We used a probing approach for co-exploring which device and which design could better help the participants in a long term, considering them as collaborative stakeholders. Data analysis is based on a text-analysis and a content analysis. The results highlight motivation as the major factor compared to the type of devices used (website, app or connected devices such as Fitbit or Hapifork) and the type of messages. They suggest that self-determination is a major factor to participants’ motivations and compliance to digital tailored prompt messages. Clearly, a friendly app is their favorite tool. Participants consider it as their best ally to follow a diet program. Our results indicate this importance of maintaining motivation in a long term which could be obtained by gamification mechanisms. Eventually, all the participants point out the need for being nudged, not judged.
Patricia.gurviez@agroparistech.fr