FoodFriend

The FoodFriend project, developed by a European consortium with the participation of CINTESIS, consists of hardware in the form of sensors, and software, in the form of an application and/or web portal that will allow the automatic monitoring of an individual’s food intake.

Diet-related diseases are a major public health concern and continue to jeopardize the health of the population and the sustainability of health systems. Unbalanced food intake can result in metabolic disorders, malnutrition, overweight, and poor mental performance, among other health risk factors such as hypertension and osteoporosis, and can also lead to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, hip fractures, liver disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer.

The Food Friend technology will be targeted at (1) preventing malnutrition in nursing homes and in tube-fed patients and (2) nutritional cross-treatment of chronic diseases (obesity, type 2 diabetes).

The FoodFriend project consists of hardware in the form of sensors, and software, in the form of an application and/or web portal that will enable automatic monitoring of an individual’s food intake.

By reducing the need for manual data entry, the effort and obligation to continually require user participation is lessened. By using current and new recommendation techniques (e.g., self-determination theory, combined care approach), personalized suggestions to end users on how to improve their eating behavior will be provided based on the collected data. In addition, visualization techniques will be able to support nutritionists in guiding the recommendation process. The development of applications for use on mobile devices will improve the accessibility of the solutions. Additionally, the project will originate an open-access database and a nutritional ontology to model nutritional behavior.

The European Food Friend consortium is composed of 17 entities (from industry, SMEs, and academia) from 4 countries (The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Turkey) covering the entire value chain needed to develop the Food Friend solution.

Portugal 2020

939,501.88€

216,968.36 €

POCI-01-0247-FEDER-047381

01/07/2020- 30/06/2023

Alberto Freitas (PI-FMUP), Cristina Santos and Paulo Santos

FYI, BE Unit Ltda, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto – ISEP, CINTESIS-FMUP