An Online Multimodal Food Data Exploration Platform for Specific Population Health: Development Study

Background: Nutrient needs vary over the lifespan. Improving knowledge of both population groups and care providers can help with healthier food choices, thereby promoting population health and preventing diseases. Providing evidence-based food knowledge online is credible, low cost, and easily accessible.

Objective: This study aimed to develop an online multimodal food data exploration platform for easy access to evidence-based diet- and nutrition-related data.

Methods: We developed an online platform named Food Atlas in collaboration with a multidisciplinary expert group from the National Institute for Nutrition and Health and Peking Union Medical College Hospital in China. To demonstrate its feasibility for Chinese food for pregnant women, a user-friendly and high-quality multimodal food knowledge graph was constructed, and various interactions with graph-structured data were developed for easy access, including graph-based interactive visualizations, natural language retrieval, and image-text retrieval. Subsequently, we evaluated Food Atlas from both the system perspective and the user perspective.

Results: The constructed multimodal food knowledge graph contained a total of 2011 entities, 10,410 triplets, and 23,497 images. Its schema consisted of 11 entity types and 26 types of semantic relations. Compared with 5 other online dietary platforms (Foodwake, Boohee, Xiachufang, Allrecipes, and Yummly), Food Atlas offers a distinct and comprehensive set of data content and system functions desired by target populations. Meanwhile, a total of 28 participants representing 4 different user groups were recruited to evaluate its usability: preparing for pregnancy (n=8), pregnant (n=12), clinicians (n=5), and dietitians (n=3). The mean System Usability Scale index of our platform was 82.5 (SD 9.94; range 40.0-82.5). This above-average usability score and the use cases indicated that Food Atlas is tailored to the needs of the target users. Furthermore, 96% (27/28) of the participants stated that the platform had high consistency, illustrating the necessity and effectiveness of health professionals participating in online, evidence-based resource development.

Conclusions: This study demonstrates the development of an online multimodal food data exploration platform and its ability to meet the rising demand for accessible, credible, and appropriate evidence-based online dietary resources. Further research and broader implementation of such platforms have the potential to popularize knowledge, thereby helping populations at different life stages make healthier food choices.