Cost of Dietary Data Acquisition with Smart Group Catering

TL;DR

This study analyzes the long-term manpower costs associated with RFID and Computer Vision-based dietary data collection in smart canteens, highlighting manpower as the dominant factor affecting data quality and overall cost.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the relationship between manpower investment and data quality in smart dietary data collection systems, offering insights for cost-effective system design.

Findings

Manpower costs dominate long-term expenses in RFID and CV-based systems.

Underestimating manpower needs compromises data quality.

Numerical simulations based on real data reveal cost composition insights.

Abstract

The need for dietary data management is growing with public awareness of food intakes. As a result, there are increasing deployments of smart canteens where dietary data is collected through either Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or Computer Vision(CV)-based solutions. As human labor is involved in both cases, manpower allocation is critical to data quality. Where manpower requirements are underestimated, data quality is compromised. This paper has studied the relation between the quality of dietary data and the manpower invested, using numerical simulations based on real data collected from multiple smart canteens. We found that in both RFID and CV-based systems, the long-term cost of dietary data acquisition is dominated by manpower. Our study provides a comprehensive understanding of the cost composition for dietary data acquisition and useful insights toward future cost effective systems.