Balance@Home - Food, Nutritional Knowledge & Personal Choice

Staff: Prof. Patrick Olivier, Dr. Christian Kray, Prof. Paula Moynihan (IAH), Dr Martyn Dade-Robertson (APL)

Sponsors: EU FP7 Marie Curie IAPP with Phillips Research

Combining work, social obligations and caring for a family in a balanced way has become an important worry of a growing group of European citizens. The proposed project will help European citizens to obtain consumer solutions for a hassle-free guidance towards a balanced lifestyle. The project focuses on methods for inferring eating habits in an unobtrusive way and seeks to use this information to provide situated feedback on meal planning and preparation. Since the project is targeting to change people's behavior, it is seen as vital to take user needs as the starting point for technology development. The main challenge will be to create solutions that give situated feedback in an enjoyable and engaging manner, leveraging social networking and the collaborative internet (i.e. Web 2.0) to affect behavior change. The Human-Computer Interaction Group's Ambient Kitchen and Philips Research's HomeLab are the key site for deployment and evaluation of the ambient intelligence innovations that the project is seeking to develop.