DiDiMap. Diet Diary and Consumption Control for Monitoring Bowel Dysfunctions and low-FODMAP Diet App

Abstract

The purpose of this project was to design and implement a mobile application for people with bowel dysfunctions, intolerances, and food allergies. The application was expected to provide all needed functionality for the target groups day to day challenges.

Irritable bowel syndrome, intolerances, and food allergies affect a significant portion of the population. On a world basis, 15\% of the population are affected by IBS alone. Although intolerances and food allergies are handled better than before in terms of adaptation from restaurants, food producers, and grocery stores, there’s still a long way to go. Food producers and caterers must, by law, inform consumers of whether their products contain certain common allergens. If a person has an allergy or intolerance outside the standard, there’s little information to get.

A systematic review and an app review mapping existing knowledge and implementations for similar apps were conducted. A mobile application was implemented for a low-FODMAP (Fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols) use case based on the conducted reviews features and shortcomings. The app contains features such as optical character recognition to identify potential trigger foods, barcode scanning of food products to retrieve nutritional and intolerance information, and a log to track meals, events during the day, and symptoms. The application also includes a communication platform for connecting and communicating with peers, which can later be expanded into discussion and motivation groups. Unlike other similar applications in the market, the app provides, in addition to peer communication, all needed functionality in a single platform, which enables utilization of log data for consumption control.

We conducted a trial of the application with 65 users who were currently following a low-FODMAP diet. Of these 8 people responded to an anonymous survey asking users to rank the system's usability on a scale, and to answer a few application-specific questions. Feedback from user testing indicated a great interest in the app. Through the survey the app gained a system usability score of 85/100, and 75\% thought the app would greatly simplify the process of following the low-FODMAP diet.