Comparison of dietary information logging methods for obesity prevention system

The worldwide prevalence of obesity is considered as a serious issue because obesity is one of the main causes of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Obesity is associated with various habits of our daily life, e.g. short sleep duration, high alcohol intake, and nonparticipation in physical exercise. Therefore, changing these habits in order to reduce body weight is recognized as an effective solution. There are some websites in effort to monitor obesity, which verify the usefulness of web-based system for health-care support. We, the authors, have been developing an obesity prevention system that helps a user to change his lifestyle with a website and health care devices. The system detects whether the user has the habits that generally considered as risk factors of obesity. After the detection, this system analyzes personal factors of weight gain, and informs it to the user of this system for changing his habits effectively. Since calorie intake is an important factor of weight gain, we have developed 3 different types of dietary information logging methods. Moreover, we evaluated and compared these methods by the experiments that we conducted. According to the results, we found that simple method with a piece of data is enough to detect calorie intake, instead of detailed method with a lot of data.