Policy Seminar | Nudging for Good

AI driven diagnostics and behavior change to improve diets and nutrition

Unhealthy diets are a critical global concern, but current dietary assessment methods are costly and challenging to implement. Mobile-phone-based interventions show some promise for improving nutrition data collection and dietary quality, especially for adolescents in low- and middle-income countries.

The Nudging for Good project has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted mobile phone application, the Plant Village Food Recognition Assistance and Nudging Insights (FRANI). This app can recognize foods, track food-group consumption, provide diet-related statistics, and nudge users to improve food consumption. Validation of FRANI for dietary assessment in adolescent girls in Ghana and Viet Nam showed it performs as well or better than the standard multi-pass 24-hour recall method, highlighting its potential to address critical data gaps and provide a platform for interventions to improve diet quality.

This seminar will launch the FRANI app and discuss the results of new dietary assessment technologies and perspectives on the way forward for technology-assisted diet assessment.

Nudging for Good is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the International Food Policy Research Institute, Plant Village at Penn State University, the University of Ghana, and the National Institute of Nutrition and Thai Nguyen National Hospital in Viet Nam.