Food Tracking Technologies and Stigma - Survey Request

[Aisha_Researcher]

Hi All,
I have t1D and am a researcher on the politics of technology. Myself and a t2D colleague from the University of Sheffield are looking into the shame and stigma around food and food-tracking technologies following the rise in eating disorders among diabetic people. We would love to know what technologies (apps/ others?) you use to help you track food in the survey below for the first stage of our research. In the future, we will be running focus groups to imagine differently designed technologies. If you have the time, fill out the survey on the poster below.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfoO6peGuLSM6FSpDhPtFn70Gnhbj1FIyaeixEKf0EMtODHOQ/viewform


'This study has been approved by @Ieva DUK and is not affiliated with Diabetes UK.'

 

[mashedupmatt]

All done - only takes a minute - good luck with your research

 

[Aisha_Researcher]

All done - only takes a minute - good luck with your research

Thank you!!

 

[Inka]

A rare comment from me but that was a bit too short! It assumed any food-tracking would be to do with diabetes; didn’t distinguish diabetes types; and didn’t allow space to say anything extra.

I use food-tracking occasionally but none of that is because of my diabetes. As a Type 1, I eat a normal diet.

 

[SimonP]

This post was going to be short, but it has apparently become long, sorry!

I am T1 and I log everything I eat, this started as I wanted to do better predictive modelling than that contained in XDrip+ (which just takes quantity of carbs, without any cares about other macros which might affect things, and other extraneous factors such as exercise, etc.) so needed some data to start off with, with a plan to then develop an app which would integrate information on food eaten (quantity, macro content - for a stab at digestion modelling), however, while I've started said app a few times, there's never enough time (and Android changes by the time I get back to my last attempt), which is very frustrating.

Now that I've started, I've simply continued to log the data in a slightly time consuming fashion using an Android app called Diet Diary (which is now open source, but I originally selected it simply as it was free and I could directly export the data I'd entered, which is what I needed to be able to do offline post-processing.) The app is almost plain text data (exports a CSV), so I came up with a text tagging method to make post-processing less painful, though I've only tried to do a full post-processing run once some time ago, and it was moderately painful (though interesting) writing the parsing and data lookup code (MATLAB, though Python next time).

I had originally planned an all singing and dancing app with photos, barcode scanning, recipe generation and portion allocation (you add x, y & z ingredients to a meal, you split it n number of ways, this is how much each person gets) and importantly integration between the food and the glucose response data (so I could search for the last times I ate X and see what BG responses I got.)

An all singing and dancing app is in many ways the wrong way to handle this, I'm only really concerned with using the data to do the blood glucose modelling, so I should ideally leave the food logging part of the app to a different developer (or ideally many developers so one can chose which is preferred,) however, none of the extant logging apps share their data (even as a csv download) and what I'd need for this to work is that any logging app broadcasts a device-wide Android Intent containing information about the contents of a given entry, which can be picked up by my BG prediction app. The other slight issue is that to be able to do historic food look-ups and then compare with BG response, there needs to be some degree of integration. I'm not sure quite what the ideal app looks like.

In order to make some progress I have now reduced scope to just get the prediction app written (with algorithm plugins, as I don't know what will necessarily make a good algorithm, and it should be as easy as possible for people to try different ideas without the pain of a full recompile or indeed needing to involve me at all) and I will then have to deal with writing something to log food so there's a data source. Perhaps this Xmas (he says again!)

Anyway, sorry for the long post, perhaps not relevant to your research, but that's my background regarding logging food, etc. I'd be interested to hear the outcome of your research.

 

[littlevoice359]

I completed the survey, mainly out of curiosity as to what questions it contained. For my part, I developed my own solution as nothing I found out there in the marketplace did everything I needed. The closest was Diabetes:M, but their meal planner was impossible to use and the reports were quite confusing.
I now have a web app that lets me plan my meals, log my insulin use and keep track of all pertinent data (e.g, weight, BP, A1c, etc) in one place. Works like a charm and also lets me keep my .Net software skills current.

 

[Lucyr]

Surprised that it didn’t ask me why I have logged food. As it’s not because of diabetes it was to try and lose weight.

 

[Inka]

Surprised that it didn’t ask me why I have logged food. As it’s not because of diabetes it was to try and lose weight.

Exactly! The occasions when I’ve logged my food is when I need to put on weight or simply out of interest/concern when I’ve worried I’m eating too much fat or not enough protein or whatever - ie a general health reason.

Maybe it’s just me but I find it hard to believe many Type 1s use such apps. I know a small number in real life, spanning ages from child to retired person and not one of them uses an app to log food or ever has done.

 

[Lucyr]

Maybe it’s just me but I find it hard to believe many Type 1s use such apps. I know a small number in real life, spanning ages from child to retired person and not one of them uses an app to log food or ever has done.

I think the difference between logging food and looking up food is important too. Many T1s I know use apps to look up the nutritional information in food, but they don’t then log the food, just use the carb info and carry on.