effective use of nutrition labels on smartphones
TRANSCRIPT
Effective Use of Nutrition Labelson Smartphones
Vladimir Kulyukin Tanwir Zaman Sarat Kiran AndhavarapuDepartment of Computer Science
Utah State UniversityLogan, UT, USA
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Introduction● Many products sold worldwide have nutrition labels
(NLs) ● In the U.S., the display of nutrition information is
mandated by the Nutrition Education and Labeling Act (NLEA) of 1990
● EU FLABEL is a similar legislative act in EU● Even highly motivated consumers find it difficult to
locate and comprehend nutrition information on many products
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Outline
● Background● NutriGlass: A System for Effective Nutrition Label Use on
Smartphones● NutriMenuNXT: Moving Caloric Awareness into Fast Food
Chains● Conclusions
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Barriers to NL Comprehension
● Recent investigations of NL use by consumers have used digital cameras to track consumers' eye movements to understand how consumers locate and understand NLs
● Four key barriers have been identified in the literature: 1) label's location on the package; 2) presentation of information within the label; 3) label's surface size; 4) surrounding visual clutter
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Recommendations from NL Use Literature
1) Central positions of NLs2) Nutrients sorted by health relevance3) Explanation of nutrients4) Reduced visual clutter around NLs 5) Increased visual salience through contrast and orientation6) Increased surface size of NLs
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NutriGlass: A System for Effective Nutrition Label Use on Smartphones
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Four Targeted Recommendations
● NutriGlass satisfies four out of six recommendations:
1) Central positions of NLs3) Explanation of nutrients4) Reduced visual clutter around NLs 6) Increased surface size of NLs
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Implementation Details
● The system's front end is implemented as an Android smartphone application
● The back end is currently implemented as a four node Linux cluster used for image analysis and data storage
● The front end and back end use the standard HTTP protocol to pass information back and forth
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Implementation Details
● The front end application sends captured frames to the back end wirelessly
● The back end cluster does image processing (1D skewed UPC and EAN barcode scanning) and, if the scanning is successful, the scanned barcode is used to retrieve a corresponding NL from a database of 230,000 NLs
● The retrieved NL is displayed on the smartphone
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Demos
Online demo videos:- lab video- supermarket video
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Hardware Details
● A Linux cluster was built out of four Dell computers ● Each node computer has an Intel Core i5-6503.2 GHz
dual-core processor that supports 64-bit computing● The node's processor has 3MB of cache memory● Each node has 6GB DDR3 SDRAM and 320GB of
hard disk space
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Software Details
● Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was installed on each machine● JBoss was used to build and configure the cluster● JBoss AS 7.1.1 was installed on every node● Load balancing is done with the Apache mod_cluster
module● The cluster has one master and three slaves● All four machines are part of a local area network
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NutriGlass 1.0 on Google Play
The free front end application is available on Google Play; search “NutriGlass on Google Play” to download
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NutriMenuNXT: Moving Caloric Awareness into Fast
Food Chains
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NutriMenuNXT
NutriMenuNXT is an Android application that allows the user to get nutritional information on menu items from 296 restaurant chains; search “NutriMenuNXT on Google Play” to download; online demo is here
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Back to Four Targeted Recommendations ● NutriGlass & NutriMenu satisfy four out of six
recommendations found in the literature:
1) Central positions of NLs: NLs are displayed centrally on the smarpthone's screen3) Explanation of nutrients: Wiki links4) Reduced visual clutter around NLs: no visual clutter around the label 6) Increased surface size of NLs: NLs are displayed on the entire touchscreen
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Food Policy Implications
● The current NL design on product packages does not have to change physically to make NL use more effective
● Consumers should be able to use their smartphones to design their own NL presentation schemes suitable to their nutrition needs without requiring product manufacturers to change physical product packages
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