A digital technology framework to optimise the self-management of obesity

Obesity is increasing globally and can cause major chronic conditions. Much research has been completed in utilising digital technologies to optimise the self-management of obesity. This research proposes an obesity management framework which highlights digital technologies to promote self-management of obesity. This work discusses preliminary research using image classification to promote food logging and crowdsourcing to determine calorie content of food images through aggregating the predictions of experts and non-experts. Preliminary results from image classification show SMO classifier achieved 73.87% accuracy in classifying 15 food items, which is promising as computer vision methods could be incorporated into food logging methods. Crowdsourcing results show that aggregated expert group mode percentage error was +2.60% (SD 3.87) in predicting calories in meals and non-expert group mode percentage error was +29.07% (SD 20.48). Further analysis on the crowdsourcing dataset will be completed to ascertain how many experts or nonexperts is needed to get the most accurate calorie prediction.