Integrated database system for mobile dietary assessment and analysis

Of the 10 leading causes of death in the US, 6 are related to diet. Unfortunately, methods for real-time assessment and proactive health management of diet do not currently exist. There are only minimally successful tools for historical analysis of diet and food consumption available. In this paper, we present an integrated database system that provides a unique perspective on how dietary assessment can be accomplished. We have designed three interconnected databases: an image database that contains data generated by food images, an experiments database that contains data related to nutritional studies and results from the image analysis, and finally an enhanced version of a nutritional database by including both nutritional and visual descriptions of each food. We believe that these databases provide tools to the healthcare community and can be used for data mining to extract diet patterns of individuals and/or entire social groups.