INTERACTIVE, WEB-BASED FOOD PORTION TUTORIAL

The primary purpose of this project is to develop and test the feasibility of a web-based program to provide food portion tutorials on demand or via an interactive training module. Food portion estimation is a considerable source of error in a dietary assessments and food portion tutorials have been shown to improve the accuracy of these estimation. Unfortunately, the current state of these tutorials have been shown to improve the accuracy of these estimations. Unfortunately, the current state of these tutorials is remarkably "low-tech", consisting primarily of pictures or plastic models of foods in various portion sizes, causing these tutorials to be labor intensive and poorly disseminated. This Phase I project will develop a web-based, advanced video-streaming, interactive, and automated food portion tutorial (CFPT) that can be easily utilized by dietary researchers, nutritionists, or general consumers. Usability evaluations with nutritionists/researchers and with potential end users will be conducted during the development process. Feasibility of the product will be evaluated by comparing CFPT-trained vs. untrained subjects on food portion estimation following a typical meal, and subsequently exposing the untrained cohorts to the CFPT on-demand features to determine if their food portion estimation improves following exposure.