Development of a Passive Dietary Monitoring System to Estimate an Individual's Dietary Intake in Households in Low and Middle-income Countries

This protocol describes the process of developing and validating a passive dietary monitoring system for the assessment of an individual's dietary intake in households in Ghana and Kenya.

The first phase of the study involves preliminary testing of identified dietary monitoring camera/video devices in a lab setting at Imperial College London under conditions similar to those anticipated in Ghana and Kenya. These conditions may include low lighting, unique foods common to certain regions, communal eating (where more than one person eats from a shared plate of cooked food) and placement of the devices on the body. This is important to guide the design of a suitable passive dietary monitoring system.

The second phase of the study involves an in-depth understanding of household set-up, composition and eating behaviour and testing the feasibility and acceptability of using passive dietary monitoring devices/system in communities in Ghana and Kenya. The data gathered in this phase of the study will inform the choice of the passive dietary monitoring system and configuration to use in the field validation study.

Finally, in the validation phase of the study, the passive dietary monitoring system developed will be set up to record food intake and estimate nutrient content of food across 88 households in Ghana and Kenya. In addition, 24h dietary recall (a commonly used method of collecting dietary intake data in population studies) and weighed food records will be used to estimate food intake in the households. The dietary intake data obtained through the passive monitoring system will be compared to 24h dietary recall and weighed food record data to validate its accuracy.