Whenever I ask my patients, if they are eating their “5 a day”, the immediate answer is “Yes, sure”. However, sometimes I´m not sure if their “Yes, sure” belongs to their real eating behavior or if it is more like a wishful thinking. This question applies for a broad range of behavior, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, having enough sleep, walking the 10.000 steps a day etc.. But how can we be sure what people really do in their everyday life?
The answer is: Ambulatory Assessment
Ambulatory Assessment is the state of the art method for assessing current emotional states, feelings, and behavior in the natural environment of individual’s everyday life. Equipped with smartphones and accelerometers, it is feasible to track how individuals feel at specific moments, what they are eating across a day and how they physically behave in real time and real life. Electronic (e)-diaries, provided by an App, prompt individuals whenever an event occur or randomly several times a day. Especially in patient groups with attention deficits, prompting short questionnaires several times a day show better recall than an extensive end-of-day questionnaire.
In the past, food-diaries were based on unhandy and retrospective paper-pencil-questionnaires or computer input. Nowadays, new technological opportunities path the way to e-food-diaries on smartphones, enabling an immediate and flexible input capability. The design of e-food-diary-apps may be different, i.e., by photos, drop-down-menu, text, or voice records. Important is the documentation of what and how much the participants eat and drink and a database that can be connected to an international or national food code for data analysis.
In the Eat2beNICE research project, we assess food intake every time participants eat or drink by a drop-down-menu that leads from general to very detailed food-items and asks for general meal portions and amounts every time participants eat and drink across the day. If a participant cannot find a particular food-item, he or she has the opportunity to enter a free text message or to record a voice message. If participants forget to enter some foods and drinks across the day, they will receive a reminder in the evening to add forgotten items. This procedure enables a very accurate tracking of participant’s food intake in our study.
To sum up, thanks to modern technology we can now accurately measure what a person feels, does and eats throughout the day. Of course, the design of an e-food-diary on the smartphone depends on the projects’- and samples’ requirements. Overall, it has to be easy to use, easy to implement in daily life and to be fun for the participants to obtain a high level of compliance and a high quality database.
References
Ebner-Priemer, U. W., & Trull, T. J. (2009). Ambulatory Assessment: An Innovative and Promising Approach for Clinical Psychology. European Psychologist, 14, 109–119. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040.14.2.109.
Engel, S. G., Crosby, Ross, Thomas, G., Bond, D., Lavender, J. M., Mason, T., . . . Wonderlich, Stephen. (2016). Ecological Momentary Assessment in Eating Disorder and Obesity Research: a Review of the Recent Literature. Current Psychiatry Reports, 18, 37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-016-0672-7.
Fuller, N. R., Fong, M., Gerofi, J., Ferkh, F., Leung, C., Leung, L., . . . Caterson, I. D. (2017). Comparison of an electronic versus traditional food diary for assessing dietary intake-A validation study. Obesity Research & Clinical Practice, 11, 647–654. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orcp.2017.04.001.
Smyth, J., Wonderlich, S., Crosby, R., Miltenberger, R., Mitchell, J., & Rorty, M. (2001). The use of ecological momentary assessment approaches in eating disorder research. The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 30, 83–95.
Stein, K. F., & Corte, C. M. (2003). Ecologic momentary assessment of eating-disordered behaviors. The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 34, 349–360. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.10194.
