Bachelor Thesis - Analysis of Interaction Patterns in Healthy Eating Applications

For my bachelor thesis at TU Munich, I analyzed interaction patterns in a mobile app designed for healthy eating.

Abstract

With the incline of overweight and obesity, also the comorbidities are rising. Treatment is a huge financial burden, hence solutions are necessary. One approach to stop the prevalence is the usage of smartphone applications as a tool to support the transition to a healthy diet. An example for such an application is Nutrilize which provides, among others, diary- and feedback-functionality. Because electronic health interventions regularly suffer from high drop-out rates, measures to identify active and inactive users are necessary. Absolute measures of in-app activity were found useful to distinguish the users. On this basis, investigation was conducted how the functions of Nutrilize were used over time. The diary and various feedback screens were utilized most frequently and the overall usage declined over time. Because different functions have a similar structure, higher-level behavior change techniques were introduced. Afterwards, the functions were assigned to the abstract techniques and then analyzed. Techniques used often and over a long period of time were ’self-monitoring’ and ’feedback’. Last investigated was the timeliness of diary entries. As meals are often tracked retrospectively, possibly occurring inaccuracies must be considered in future studies.

The thesis can be downloaded here .