Designing a digital dietician

Kim Thy Nguyen with a prototype of the dietician App. (Photo: Tomas van Dijk)

A healthy diet is especially important for couples wishing to become parents. Kim Thy Nguyen (MSc) designed a webtool to help prospective parents improve their eating patterns.

Medical doctor and epidemiologist, Professor Dr Regine Steegers-Theunissen, of Erasmus Medical Centre, has been actively promoting healthy food patterns and lifestyles for parents-to-be. Healthy diets and lifestyles and successful pregnancies are not related like cause and effect, but the associations are strong. In 2007, Steegers-Theunissen started a preconception clinic, called ‘Achieving a healthy pregnancy’, to help make couples aware of their diet and lifestyle as preparation for their future pregnancies. But she wished to further support and guide couples – yes, also the men – about food and drink issues before and during pregnancy.

Kim Thy Nguyen (MSc) took up the gauntlet for her MSc thesis at the faculty of Industrial Design and Engineering. She was to make a website annex app for the target group tailored to nutrition and lifestyle improvement. Nguyen made use of her two years of psychology studies at Erasmus University. She knew that behavioural change is a difficult thing to achieve and that James Prochaska had written a ’transtheoretical model’ about this in which he argued that behavioural change – like quitting smoking – develops in five or six steps. Only when people have arrived at a certain level, do they become sensitive to health information.

Nguyen developed a website prototype which provides interested couples with information about healthy nutrition. The couples are asked to keep score of the items they eat and drink. The programme then provides feedback on the quantities and items and also issues health tips (´try a less fat cheese instead´). A fellow-student from the Haagse Hogeschool, Joyce Boer, wrote the diet tips and recipes. An overview page shows the participant and his/her doctor what parts of the diet are on target (green check mark) or not quite there yet (red cross).

The prototype on www.slimmerzwanger.nl is Nguyen’s ‘masterpiece’. Programmers will now have to develop it into a web service that interested couples can login to. Nguyen hopes the application will ultimately be developed for smart phones, bringing ‘E-healthcare’ up close and personal.

Kim Thy Nguyen, ‘Slimmer zwanger’, MSc thesis, 10 June 2011, supervisors Prof. Richard Goossens and Prof. Dr. Regine Steegers-Theunissen