MySwissFoodPyramid: Your Digital Coach for a Balanced Diet

Mobile Diet Coach: MySwissFoodPyramid

The digital diet coaches of this project aim to provide fully-automated interventions to improve food literacy and support health-promoting dietary behaviors.

Results of menuCH, the National Nutrition Survey conducted 2014 in Switzerland, showed that adults’ food intake is not fully in line with Swiss food-based dietary guidelines that is, the Swiss food pyramid. Therefore, with this project the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (FSVO) seeks for new and effective means to support people in eating a better balanced diet.

Advanced technology-based delivery modes, such as a fully automated digital coach, make interventions to improve food literacy and support health-promoting dietary behaviors accessible for the entire population. Consumers may consult the Mobile Diet Coach on their own initiative or because health professionals, such as physicians, nutritionists, and registered dieticians invited them to do so. Elements like self-monitoring of food consumption and comparisons of intake to dietary guidelines, tailored practical feedbacks, goal setting and action plan, gamification etc. will encourage users to strive for a health-promoting diet. With help of the Mobile Diet Coach, consumers will gain nutritional knowledge and improve skills and abilities that are essential to take health-promoting food decisions in many situations and settings of daily life.

MySwissFoodPyramid App

The app MySwissFoodPyramid is available now. The overall goal of the app is to increase food literacy in the Swiss population by an interactive food diary and personalized feedback through the MobileCoach-based chat interface and the digital coaches Lukas or Anna. The app is available in French, Italian and German language versions in the Swiss app stores:

mySwissFoodPyramid Screenshots

Publications

Kowatsch, T., Fischer-Taeschler, D., Putzing, F., Bürki, P., Stettler, C., Chiesa-Tanner, G., Fleisch, E. (2019) Die digitale Pille für chronische Krankheiten, in: Digitale Transformation von Dienstleistungen im Gesundheitswesen VI – Impulse für die Forschung, M. Pfannstiel, P. Da-Cruz and H. Mehlich (eds.), Springer Gabler, Heidelberg, Germany, 205-231. (PDF)

Related Work

Paz, R., Haug, S., Filler, A., Kowatsch, T., Schaub, M.P. (2017) Engagement within a Mobile Phone-based Smoking Cessation Intervention for Adolescents and Its Association with Participant Characteristics and Outcomes, Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) 19(10):e356.(PDF)

Haug, S., Paz, R., Meyer, C., Filler, A., Kowatsch, T., Schaub, M.P. (2017) A Mobile Phone-Based Life Skills Training Program for Substance Use Prevention Among Adolescents: Pre-Post Study on the Acceptance and Potential Effectiveness of the Program Ready4life, JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 5(10):e143. PDF

Kowatsch, T., Nißen, M.K., Shih, I., Rüegger, D., Volland, D., Filler, A., Künzler, F., Barata, F., Haug, S., Büchter, D., Brogle, B., Heldt, K., Gindrat, P., Farpour-Lambert, N., l’Allemand, D. (2017) Text-based Healthcare Chatbots Supporting Patient and Health Professional Teams: Preliminary Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial on Childhood Obesity, Persuasive Embodied Agents for Behavior Change (PEACH 2017) Workshop, co-located with the 17th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2017), Stockholm, Sweden. PDF

Haug, S., Paz, R., Kowatsch, T., Filler, A., Schaub, M.P. (2017) Efficacy of a Technology-based Integrated Smoking Cessation and Alcohol Intervention for Smoking Cessation in Adolescents: Results of a Cluster-randomised Controlled Trial, Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment 82(11), 55-66. PDF

Kowatsch, T., Volland, D., Shih, I., Rüegger, D., Künzler, F., Barata, F., Filler, A., Büchter, D., Brogle, B., Heldt, K., Gindrat, P., Farpour-Lambert, N., l’Allemand, D. (2017) Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Chat App for the Open Source Behavioral Health Intervention Platform MobileCoach, In: Maedche A., vom Brocke J., Hevner A. (eds) Designing the Digital Transformation. DESRIST 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10243. Springer: Berlin; Germany, 485-489. (Paper-PDF | Poster-PDF | Slide-PDF | Screencast)

Kowatsch, T., Wahle, F., Filler, A. (2017) stressOUT: Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Mouse-based Stress Management Service, In: Designing the Digital Transformation: DESRIST 2017 Research in Progress Proceedings, Maedche, A., vom Brocke, J., Hevner, A. (eds), KIT Scientific Working Papers; 64, Karlsruhe, Germany, 37-45. (PDF)

Haug, S., Castro, R., Kowatsch, T., Filler, A., Dickson-Spillmann, M., Dey, M., Schaub, M.P. (2017) Efficacy of a web- and text messaging-based intervention to reduce problem drinking in adolescents: Results of a cluster-randomised controlled trial, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 85(2),147-159. (PDF)

Castro, R., Haug, S., Kowatsch, T., Filler, A., Schaub, M.P. (2017) Engagement Within a Mobile Phone–Based Smoking Cessation Intervention for Adolescents and its Association With Participant Characteristics and Outcomes, Addictive Behaviors 72: 64-71. (PDF)

Tinschert, P., Barata, F., Kowatsch, T. (2017) Enhancing Asthma Control through IT: Design, Implementation and Planned Evaluation of the Mobile Asthma Companion, in Leimeister, J.M.; Brenner, W. (Hrsg.): Proceedings der 13th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI 2017), St. Gallen, 1291-1294. (PDF)

Barata, F., Kowatsch, T., Tinschert, P., Filler, A., (2016) Personal MobileCoach: Tailoring Behavioral Interventions to the Needs of Individual Participants, UbiComp ’16 Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct  Workshop Designing, Developing, and Evaluating The Internet of Personal Health (IoPH), Heidelberg, Germany, 1089-1094. (PDF)

Kowatsch, T., Wahle, F., Filler, A., Kehr, F., Volland, D., Haug, S., Jenny, G., Bauer, G., Fleisch, E., (2015) Towards Short-Term Detection of Job Strain in Knowledge Workers with a Minimal-Invasive Information System Service: Theoretical Foundation and Experimental Design, 23rd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Münster, Germany. (Paper-PDF) (Poster-PDF)

Filler, A., Kowatsch, T., Haug, S., Wahle, F., Staake, T. & Fleisch, E. (2015) MobileCoach: A Novel Open Source Platform for the Design of Evidence-based, Scalable and Low-Cost Behavioral Health Interventions – Overview and Preliminary Evaluation in the Public Health Context. Wireless Telecommunications Symposium 2015 (WTS 2015), New York, USA. *** Outstanding Paper Award & Best Graduate Student Paper Award*** PDF

Haug, S., Paz, R., Filler, A., Kowatsch, T., Fleisch, E., Schaub, M.P. (2014) Efficacy of an integrated smoking cessation and alcohol intervention compared to a smoking cessation only intervention for smoking cessation in young people delivered via Internet and mobile phone: Study protocol of a two-arm cluster RCT, BMC Public Health 14 (1140), 1-8. PDF

Filler, A., Haug, S., Kowatsch, T. (2014) The MobileCoach – An Open Source Solution for Behavioral Change Interventions, Abstract presented at the 7th Scientific Meeting of the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions (ISRII), Symposium on Interactive Technology-Driven Interventions for Smoking Cessation: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Valencia, Spain. PDF

Kowatsch, T., Wahle, F., Filler, A., Fleisch, E. (2014) Predicting Adverse Behavior with Early Warning Health Information Systems by Mining Association Rules on Multi-dimensional Behavior: A Proposal, Poster presented at the 7th Scientific Meeting of the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions (ISRII), Valencia, Spain. PDF

Haug, S., Kowatsch, T., Paz, R., Filler, A., Schaub, M.P. (2014) Efficacy of a web- and text messaging-based intervention to reduce problem drinking in young people, BMC Public Health (14:809), 1-8. PDF

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CDHI Research Team

Dirk Volland, Sigrid Beer-Borst, Andreas Filler, Tobias Kowatsch

Runtime

May 2017 – Feb 2018

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