THE FOOD DETECTIVE: A PERSONALIZED MOBILE APPLICATION FOR HEALTH TRACKING

Leading a healthy lifestyle is essential for achieving individuals' wellbeing. With different food products distributed in supermarkets, people who care about their health, especially those with certain health conditions, are interested in knowing the ingredients of processed food in order to determine its suitability. However, reading the labels of each product every time they want to buy is a challenging, tedious and time-consuming activity. Our paper presents The Food Detective, which is a mobile application that aims to create awareness regarding consuming processed food. It has been designed to serve people with allergies, pregnant women, and dieters to achieve their common goal of consuming healthy food products. The Food Detective is an eHealth portable application, which provides users with scanning functionality that allows users to scan the barcode of any product to detect its suitability based to the user's specific health conditions. It presents a personalized interface for each user, based on their category. By applying simple user modeling techniques, the interface changes, depending on the profile of each of these the three communities (allergies, pregnant, and diet). Being a mobile application, it allows data access anywhere, anytime, so users could use it on the go while shopping. Users' trials have shown positive functional and usability results.