Nutrition Garden - A gamified mobile app for motivating people to eat specific food to prevent non-communicable diseases

Abstract

Many people are struggling with making decisions about changing and more importantly maintaining their eating habits even though information about this specific topic is very widespread in current media. Choosing the right nutrients as part of a healthy diet is vital for the prevention of so-called non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes or cancer. A big number of applications are available to smartphone users around the world including so-called mHealth apps (mobile health applications). Part of this mHealth application space are also apps that aim to educate people about nutrition and help them change their eating habits as part of a healthy diet. However, in the author’s opinion, state-of-the-art applications still lack to motivate people to eat healthy foods especially for combating the NCDs by delivering specific food information. Therefore, the authors of this paper propose the "Nutrition Garden" app that was created together with the help of field experts and users of the target group. It is a mobile application that motivates, supports, and encourages people to eat healthy by consuming a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, fish oils, etc. to prevent NCDs, as well as tightening up the knowledge on nutritional science for its users. Together with using gamification elements to help users stay motivated over an extended period and at the same time focus on curated food items it provides, in the author’s opinion, a novel approach for an mHealth application in the domain of nutritional science.