Assessment of compliance and validity of digital application based diet diary with suggestive local food habits for prevention of dental caries in children.

Aim- The aim of the study is to create a digital application based diet diary which helps in record maintenance of diet and suggests healthier sugar substitutes. The secondary aim of the study is to conduct a clinician trial to check the digital application’s validity and usability  in 6-12 year old children.

Background- Dietary intake of an individual has a direct correlation with the dental and oral health. For this reason, diet diaries have been recommended as a dietary assessment tool that enables the tailoring of effective dietary advice for individual patients in dental practice. However, despite the recognized merits of diet diaries as dietary assessment and self-monitoring tools in the general literature, an early search of literature revealed that very little empirical work had been devoted to this topic in the dental context. Mobile applications have been developed to monitor health, including diet. Diet apps aim to reduce and resolve common limitations associated with the conventional pen and paper dietary assessment methods. However, few studies report the validity of these apps for use in regular practice. Hence, there is a need for a new app which can overcome these drawbacks. ‘Sugar smart’  is a unique smartphone  dietary assessment app that is being developed which uses artificial intelligence and permits real-time editing of food journals and makes recording and management of diet easier for the patients.

Methodology- 100 children age 6-12 reporting to the department of Pediatric dentistry will be selected and their parents will be introduced to the digital application. They will be asked to use the application for 1 week. After that, on follow-up 2 questionnaire will be provided to the parents to asses their feedback.