Characteristics of Smartphone Applications for Nutrition Improvement in Community Settings: A Scoping Review

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Characteristics of Smartphone Applications for Nutrition Improvement in Community Settings: A scoping Review

Smartphone apps can be a useful way to support nutrition improvement. Nutrition improvement can be defined as any attempt to guide an individual’s diet towards more association with healthy eating guidelines. Poor dietary intake can be related to social, physical, and macrolevel environmental factors. Although public health nutrition improvement programs are often set in place in community settings, they must overcome a number of unique challenges. These challenges include the conflict of reaching a large population that is dispersed and hard to reach. With these challenges in mind, the use of smartphone applications to support nutrition improvement in community settings is becoming more popular. Keeping smartphone users engaged in health apps has been a challenge. It has been recommended as a benchmark for health apps success to provide an engaging user experience so that users continue returning to the app. Unfortunately, there has been a lack of scientific evaluation to determine the best apps for specific populations, especially in community settings.

This scoping review looked at many different health applications to see what features were the most popular. The most frequently incorporated feature in the applications was food logging. This makes sense as apps such as MyFitnessPal have been extremely popular among the population. Other common features found in the apps reviewed included push notifications, graphs of food intake, dietary goal setting, and barcode scanning. This information may give more insight into ways to create popular health apps that appeal to a large population.

 
 

Tonkin, E., Brimblecombe, J., & Wycherley, T. P. (2017). Characteristics of Smartphone Applications for Nutrition Improvement in Community Settings: A Scoping Review. Advances In Nutrition (Bethesda, Md.), 8(2), 308-322. doi:10.3945/an.116.013748

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