High-frequency diet quality mapping (Citizen-H2D3)

The project implements a novel and low-cost system to move data collection of diet quality from static researcher-led methods, towards digitally leveraged dynamic citizen-led systems that enable flexible integration with other data sources for automated analytics. The system crowdsources real-time dietary data from volunteer citizens on a (currently) weekly basis through a mobile phone-based interface.
Participants are contacted through an unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) system - functional on both feature and smartphones. Consenting respondents are requested to reply (yes or no) to whether they have consumed, in the last 24 hours, food items within 31 food groups. Food groups are nationally adapted versions of the Diet Quality Questionnaire (DQ-Q) (Herforth et al. 2020) question-set. Respondents also provide basic socio-economic information (age, sex, and economic quantile). Following submission, participants receive a small payment of phone credit.