Foodbot: A Goal-Oriented Just-in-Time Healthy Eating Interventions Chatbot

TL;DR

Foodbot is a chatbot-based mobile health application that provides goal-oriented, just-in-time interventions for healthy eating, addressing manual logging and goal-setting issues in existing apps through speech recognition and personalized guidance.

Contribution

Introduces Foodbot, a novel chatbot platform utilizing a large-scale food knowledge graph for automatic food logging and personalized, timely dietary interventions.

Findings

Effective automatic food intake recording via speech recognition.

Personalized JIT notifications improve user engagement.

Open-source tools enable scalable healthy eating support.

Abstract

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.