Calorie counting smart phone apps: Effectiveness in nutritional awareness, lifestyle modification and weight management among young Indian adults

Abstract

Calorie counting mobile apps claim to assist in weight management by helping users monitor their diets and track activity. This study assessed quality and effectiveness of popular calorie counting apps in weight management and behaviour change. Top 20 apps were selected from Google Play store and their quality was assessed using a 55-point scoring scale on attributes like standards used, content accuracy, user interface and sources of database. The mean (±SD (standard deviation)) quality score was 36.95 (±5.65). The calorie and activity recommendations were compared with standards and over 65 per cent apps over/underestimated calorie intake. To assess effectiveness, 60 young volunteers were recruited and divided into two groups. The intervention group (n = 30) was asked to use one of the top 3 apps for 8 weeks. Pre- and post-comparisons were made with the control group (n = 28). No significant difference was noted in anthropometry or food consumption. There was increasing trend (13.33%) in physical activity in the intervention group.

Effectiveness of Integrated Technology Apps for Supporting Healthy Food Purchasing and Consumption: A Systematic Review

“…Technology apps are a motivational and self-monitoring tool, but it is highly dependent on the participant's motivation and intention to use the app. Studies suggested that more intensive follow-ups with apps notifications may enhance the efficacy of the apps intervention [54,59]. To counter this, technology apps must provide the user-desired needs of the combination of credentialed knowledge, interactivity, personalisation, and individual feedback, in addition to providing information about positive food-related behaviour changes [64,65].…”

“…In general, most of the studies were conducted in the United States (n = 9, 45%) [24][25][26]30,32,[52][53][54][55], followed by Australia (n = 2, 10%) [56,57] and Korea (n = 2, 10%) [28,33]. The majority of studies were from developed Western countries (n = 16, 80%) [19,[24][25][26][27][29][30][31][32][52][53][54][55][56][57][58], followed by three Asian countries (Korea and India) [28,33,59] and one Western Asian country (Saudi Arabia) [60]. Most of the technology app devices were smartphones, and only two early studies used a personal digital assistant (PDA).…”

“…Some researchers collected food consumption data for other purposes of analysis. For example, some researchers used apps to monitor the dietary intake and assist in weight management [24,26,59]. Dodd et al (2017) used apps to provide lifestyle advice to pregnant women [56].…”

EatNTrack Malaysia Mobile Application Food Calories Tracker - A Conceptual Paper

“…Due to the complexities in assessing food consumption, sizes, and portions, the field of dietary assessment has looked to technology to assist in measuring food intakes (Ngo et al, 2009). According to Banerjee et al (2020), most participants were confused with portion sizes or difficulties of manual entry as major limits for usage of the apps. The innovation of the EatNTrack app to use cameras provides easier ways to estimate calories through features such as photo capture of food.…”

Qualitative Assessment of Health Apps: An Emerging Market Study

“…There is an obvious need on part of the app providers to improve the content accuracy. Banerjeeet al has reported a deficiency of common Indian recipes in FDB of these apps [34]. This phenomenon may be on account of app development taking place in developed parts of the world and the variations of cuisines across the globe.…”