Take photos of food, track calorie intake by using NutriAIDE app by ICMR-NIN

Hyderabad: To empower users with data on healthy and sustainable nutrition, NutriAIDE, an innovative and comprehensive mobile application was launched on Thursday by ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) built in association with Augsburg University, Germany.

Dr R Hemalatha, director of ICMR-NIN and Prof Markus Keck, chair of Urban Climate Resilience at Augsburg University launched the app, in the presence of a team of scientists and professors working on the transformation of urban food environments.

The app is an outcome of an ongoing collaborative research project titled ‘NutriAIDE - Building smart food environments for improved nutrition.’ Developed in an Indo-German collaboration with leading institutes including the ICMR-NIN, the University of Augsburg, the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke, and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy, and Chandigarh-based start-up Calvry Wellness Solutions Pvt Ltd, NutriAIDE aims to investigate and address crucial aspects of food practices and nutrition-related decision-making.

More than a calorie-counting app

After almost two years of development and testing, the beta version of the NutriAIDE app was launched on Thursday. Saying that NutriAIDE is more than a calorie-counting app, its makers said that the app is a tool that helps users reflect on their eating habits and enables them to transform their personal behaviour and food environment.

It also involves an AI-based photo recognition tool that can identify the foods one is consuming by just clicking a picture of the food for intake assessment. In addition, the app enables one to keep track of micro and macronutrient content and also dynamically calculates the carbon footprint of food choices of an individual.

Meet the research team

The research team comprises human geographers, health communicators, neuropsychologists, sustainability scientists, nutritionists and public health researchers.

In the initial phase, the app was piloted using 720 samples in Hyderabad city. With this, the entire NutriAIDE project will be entering its second phase, in which the positive effects of the NutriAIDE app on users’ food choices and nutrition will be assessed. This brings the project a big step closer to its goal of providing an effective app to promote healthy and sustainable nutrition among the Indian population.

“NutriAIDE app serves as a powerful tool for consumers to measure and transform their personal food practices by facilitating a deeper understanding of the impact of dietary choices, not only on individual health but also on the environment. It seeks to provide an engaging experience with an opportunity to ‘mind’ what they eat, ‘move’ to ensure adequate physical activity and ‘map’ their food environments and rate them. I am sure NutriAIDE will promote informed decisions and help users to embrace positive changes for their well-being and that of the environment,” said Dr Hemalatha director of NIN and coordinator of the project on the Indian side while unveiling the app.

Prof Markus Keck said, “This project is an opportunity to do truly transformative science that will make a lasting contribution to improving food choices and nutrition in India. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and scientific research, the team aims to improve the way individuals approach nutrition by following a holistic approach.”

Change in nutritional landscape

ICMR-NIN principal investigator Dr SubbaRao M Gavaravarapu elaborated, “At ICMR-NIN, we believe that nutrition and health communication can bring about sustainable behaviour change only if individual, interpersonal, community and policy level changes are achieved. The app intends to empower and inform the users not only about the nutritional aspects of their foods but also the factors that shape their food environments,”

“When people start to understand what is on their plate, how nutritious it is and how sustainable it is, they are likely to explore healthier options both for themselves and the planet and thus it would herald a change in the food environments,” he said.

Sustainability scientist and principal investigator of the Wuppertal Institute, Lena Hennes explained that ‘the way we eat substantially influences our individual health status, our quality of life and our well-being. The food environment is a crucial influence on our personal diet and therefore requires greater attention.’