A mobile adviser of healthy eating by reading ingredient labels

Abstract

Understanding ingredients or additives in food is essential for a healthy life. The general public should be encouraged to learn more about the effect of food they consume, especially for people with allergy or other health problems. However, reading the ingredient label of every packaged food is tedious and no one will spend time on this. This paper proposed a mobile app to leverage the troublesome and at the same time provide health advices of packaged food. To facilitate acquisition of the ingredient list, apart from barcode scanning, we recognize text on the ingredient labels directly. Thus, our application will provide proper alert on allergen found in food. Also it suggests users to avoid food that is harmful to health in long term, like high fat or calories food. A preliminary user study reveals that the adviser app is useful and welcomed by many users who care about their dietary.