Document Type
Article
Source Publication Title
JMIR mHealth and uHealth
DOI
http://doi.org/10.2196/11170
Abstract
Background: New methods for assessing diet in research are being developed to address the limitations of traditional dietary assessment methods. Mobile device–assisted ecological momentary diet assessment (mEMDA) is a new dietary assessment method that has not yet been optimized and has the potential to minimize recall biases and participant burden while maximizing ecological validity. There have been limited efforts to characterize the use of mEMDA in behavioral research settings. Objective: The aims of this study were to summarize mEMDA protocols used in research to date, to characterize key aspects of these assessment approaches, and to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of mEMDA compared with the traditional dietary assessment methods as well as implications for future mEMDA research. Methods: Studies that used mobile devices and described mEMDA protocols to assess dietary intake were included. Data were extracted according to Preferred Reporting of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses and Cochrane guidelines and then synthesized narratively. Results: The review included 20 studies with unique mEMDA protocols. Of these, 50% (10/20) used participant-initiated reports of intake at eating events (event-contingent mEMDA), and 50% (10/20) used researcher-initiated prompts requesting that participants report recent dietary intake (signal-contingent mEMDA). A majority of the study protocols (60%, 12/20) enabled participants to use mobile phones to report dietary data. Event-contingent mEMDA protocols most commonly assessed diet in real time, used dietary records for data collection (60%, 6/10), and provided estimates of energy and nutrient intake (60%, 6/10). All signal-contingent mEMDA protocols used a near real-time recall approach with unannounced (ie, random) abbreviated diet surveys. Most signal-contingent protocols (70%, 7/10) assessed the frequency with which (targeted) foods or food groups were consumed. Relatively few (30%, 6/20) studies compared mEMDA with the traditional dietary assessment methods. Conclusions: This review demonstrates that mEMDA has the potential to reduce participant burden and recall bias, thus advancing the field beyond current dietary assessment methods while maximizing ecological validity. [©Susan M Schembre, Yue Liao, Sydney G O'Connor, Melanie D Hingle, Shu-En Shen, Katarina G Hamoy, Jimi Huh, Genevieve F Dunton, Rick Weiss, Cynthia A Thomson, Carol J Boushey. Originally published in JMIR Mhealth and Uhealth (http://mhealth.jmir.org), 20.11.2018. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR mhealth and uhealth, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://mhealth.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. DOI: 10.2196/11170].
Disciplines
Kinesiology | Life Sciences
Publication Date
11-20-2018
Language
English
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Schembre, Susan M.; Liao, Yue; O’Connor, Sydney G.; Hingle, Melanie D.; Shen, Shu-En; Hamoy, Katarina G.; Huh, Jimi; Dunton, Genevieve F.; Weiss, Rick; Thomson, Cynthia A.; and Boushey, Carol J., "Mobile Ecological Momentary Diet Assessment Methods for Behavioral Research: Systematic Review" (2018). Kinesiology Faculty Publications & Presentations. 14.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/kinesiology_facpubs/14