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.

Opening Remarks

• Marie Ruel, Director of Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division, IFPRI

Part 1: Recent developments in new technologies for dietary assessment and launch of Nudging for Good Plant Village FRANI application

Validity and feasibility of using FRANI, a new AI-based phone application to assess diets and improve the quality of food choices of adolescents in Ghana and Vietnam

• Aulo Gelli, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI
• Pete McCloskey (via pre-recorded video)
• Phuong Nguyen, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI (via pre-recorded video)
• Gloria Folson, Research Fellow, Department of Nutrition, the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, University of Ghana (via pre-recorded video)

Passive Dietary Monitoring - the use of wearable cameras and AI to quantify dietary intake

• Benny Lo team, Senior Lecturer, Imperial College, London

INDDEX24 and Global Diet Quality Score applications

• Winnie Bell, Senior Researcher, Tufts University, INDDEX Project
• Mourad Moursi, Senior Dietary Survey Advisor, Intake Center for Dietary Assessment

Q&A

Part 2: Roundtable discussion on policy implications

• Jennie Coates, Associate Professor, Senior Researcher, Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, USAID Innovation lab for Nutrition
• Lynnda Kiess, Senior Programme Advisor Nutrition, World Food Programme (WFP)
• Arlene Mitchell, Executive Director, Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF)
• David Hughes, Huck Chair in Global Food Security, Penn State University, Director of USAID Innovation Lab on Current and Emerging Threats to Crops, Founder of Carbon4Good
• Shelly Sundberg, Senior Program Officer, Nutrition, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)

Q&A

Closing Remarks

• Marie Ruel, Director of Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division, IFPRI