Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare. 6th International Conference, MobiHealth 2016, Milan, Italy, November 14-16, 2016, Proceedings

Research Article

A Mobile Adviser of Healthy Eating by Reading Ingredient Labels

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-319-58877-3_4,
        author={Man Wong and Qing Ye and Yuk Chan Kylar and Wai-Man Pang and Kin Kwan},
        title={A Mobile Adviser of Healthy Eating by Reading Ingredient Labels},
        proceedings={Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare. 6th International Conference, MobiHealth 2016, Milan, Italy, November 14-16, 2016, Proceedings},
        proceedings_a={MOBIHEALTH},
        year={2017},
        month={6},
        keywords={Healthy dietary Food ingredient Text recognition Health suggestion Mobile health},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-319-58877-3_4}
    }
    
  • Man Wong
    Qing Ye
    Yuk Chan Kylar
    Wai-Man Pang
    Kin Kwan
    Year: 2017
    A Mobile Adviser of Healthy Eating by Reading Ingredient Labels
    MOBIHEALTH
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-58877-3_4
Man Wong1,*, Qing Ye1, Yuk Chan Kylar1, Wai-Man Pang1, Kin Kwan1
  • 1: Caritas Institute of Higher Education
*Contact email: wmpang@ieee.org

Abstract

Understanding ingredients or additives in food is essential for a healthy life. The general public should be encouraged to learn more about the effect of food they consume, especially for people with allergy or other health problems. However, reading the ingredient label of every packaged food is tedious and no one will spend time on this. This paper proposed a mobile app to leverage the troublesome and at the same time provide health advices of packaged food. To facilitate acquisition of the ingredient list, apart from barcode scanning, we recognize text on the ingredient labels directly. Thus, our application will provide proper alert on allergen found in food. Also it suggests users to avoid food that is harmful to health in long term, like high fat or calories food. A preliminary user study reveals that the adviser app is useful and welcomed by many users who care about their dietary.