Acceptability and Feasibility of Smartphone-Assisted 24 h Recalls in the Chinese Population

Citation

Zang, Jiajie; Song, Jun; Wang, Zhengyuan; Yao, Chunxia; Ma, Jianhong; Huang, Cuihua; Zhu, Zhenni; Taillie, Lindsey Smith; Du, Shufa; & Hua, Jenna, et al. (2015). Acceptability and Feasibility of Smartphone-Assisted 24 h Recalls in the Chinese Population. Public Health Nutrition, 18(18), 3272-3277. PMCID: PMC4600407

Abstract

Objective: To examine the acceptability and feasibility of using smartphone technology to assess beverage intake and evaluate whether the feasibility of smartphone use is greater amongst key subpopulations.
Design: An acceptability and feasibility study of recording the video dietary record, the acceptability of the ecological momentary assessment (EMA), wearing smartphones and whether the videos helped participants recall intake after a cross-over validation study.
Setting: Rural and urban area in Shanghai, China.
Subjects: 110 healthy adults (20-40 years old).
Results: Most participants reported that the phone was acceptable in most aspects, including that videos were easy to use (70%), helped with recalls (77%), EMA reminders helped them record intake (75%), and apps were easy to understand (85%). However, 49% of the participants reported that they had trouble remembering to take videos of the beverages before consumption or 46% felt embarrassed taking videos in front of others. Moreover, 72% reported that the EMA reminders affected their consumption. When assessed overall acceptability of using smartphone, 72% of the participants were favorable responders. There were no statistically significant differences in overall acceptability for overweight vs. normal weight or for rural vs. urban residents. However, we did find that the overall acceptability was higher for males (81%) than females (61%,p=0.017).
Conclusions: Our study did not find smartphone technology helped with dietary assessments in Chinese population. However, simpler approaches, such as using photographs instead of videos, may be more feasible for enhancing 24 h dietary recalls.

URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1368980015000907

Reference Type

Journal Article

Year Published

2015

Journal Title

Public Health Nutrition

Author(s)

Zang, Jiajie
Song, Jun
Wang, Zhengyuan
Yao, Chunxia
Ma, Jianhong
Huang, Cuihua
Zhu, Zhenni
Taillie, Lindsey Smith
Du, Shufa
Hua, Jenna
Seto, Edmund Y. W.
Popkin, Barry M.
Zou, Shurong

PMCID

PMC4600407

ORCiD

Taillie - 0000-0002-4555-2525
Popkin - 0000-0001-9495-9324
Du - 0000-0003-1156-0866