Understanding People's Perceptions of Approaches to Semi-Automated Dietary Monitoring

The respective benefits and drawbacks of manual food journaling and automated dietary monitoring (ADM) suggest the value of semi-automated journaling systems combining the approaches. However, the current understanding of how people anticipate strategies for implementing semi-automated food journaling systems is limited. We therefore conduct a speculative survey study with 600 responses, examining how people anticipate approaches to automatic capture and prompting for details. Participants feel the location and detection capability of ADM sensors influences anticipated physical, social, and privacy burdens. People more positively anticipate prompts which contain information relevant to their journaling goals, help them recall what they ate, and are quick to respond to. Our work suggests a tradeoff between ADM systems' detection performance and anticipated acceptability, with sensors on facial areas having higher performance but lower acceptability than sensors in other areas and more usable prompting methods like those containing specific foods being more challenging to produce than manual reminders. We suggest opportunities to improve higher-acceptability, lower-accuracy ADM sensors, select approaches based on individual and practitioner journaling needs, and better describe capabilities to potential users.