Foodbot: A Goal-Oriented Just-in-Time Healthy Eating Interventions Chatbot
This addresses the problem of ineffective mobile health tools for promoting healthy eating in the general population, but it is incremental as it builds on existing chatbot and knowledge graph technologies.
The authors tackled the design flaws in mobile health apps for healthy eating, such as tedious food logging and lack of goal setting, by developing Foodbot, a chatbot-based application that uses speech recognition and a food knowledge graph to record intake and provide just-in-time interventions, resulting in a practical solution for supporting healthy eating in the general population.
Recent research has identified a few design flaws in popular mobile health (mHealth) applications for promoting healthy eating lifestyle, such as mobile food journals. These include tediousness of manual food logging, inadequate food database coverage, and a lack of healthy dietary goal setting. To address these issues, we present Foodbot, a chatbot-based mHealth application for goal-oriented just-in-time (JIT) healthy eating interventions. Powered by a large-scale food knowledge graph, Foodbot utilizes automatic speech recognition and mobile messaging interface to record food intake. Moreover, Foodbot allows users to set goals and guides their behavior toward the goals via JIT notification prompts, interactive dialogues, and personalized recommendation. Altogether, the Foodbot framework demonstrates the use of open-source data, tools, and platforms to build a practical mHealth solution for supporting healthy eating lifestyle in the general population.