Unfortunately, the app itself is so laggy & buggy that I can’t give it more than 1-star. Personally I felt company was highly interested in my weight loss journey before I activated plan then no one cares about me, or I noticed they’ve charged me for another 3 months subscription which I did not authorize. I’ve made 3 attempts via email to make contact with [app] to end my membership and request a refund and I received an email back stating they’ll be in contact in the next 48hrs but I have never heard back from them.

Like per instance MFP food scanner is now a paid feature.note I have no link with waistline or anything but i highly recommend it. If you are looking for an app to help with weight management try Healthie, Wellory, Lose It, or Noom. Not all of these are free but they do help with choosing healthy options at restaurants. In addition, users from different cultures may have different app needs (eg, product availability, serving size differences, religious and other food restrictions). To ensure the generalizability and applicability of such findings to a specific market, the results should also include analysis of additional apps and reviews (both global and local apps) in the local language.

Similarly, reviewers (consumers who write reviews) have been shown to differ from other customers in terms of income, education, and purchasing behavior [52]. Hence, our results cannot be generalized to the entire population of app users. To increase usage and enable better health and nutrition outcomes, it is necessary to better understand user needs. It is evident that users are not simply looking for pure information when using mobile health apps.

Free Nutrition Apps

• By identifying the features or functions that attract consumers’ attention, this study suggests areas for app development and improvement that have potential to increase users’ positive evaluation and motivation, leading to nutrition/health improvement.
• Numerous studies have examined consumer opinions of existing apps through surveys, interviews, and qualitative content analysis.
• Whether you’re using these tools to identify trigger foods or create new habits, nutrition apps can help you to make sense of what you’re eating, how much, and develop a plan for your health moving forward.
• Definitely worth reading their post on data sources to understand the different options for recording; I’m a fan of just finding the closest item to what I’m eating in NCCDB and then getting all the correct data.
• “Research shows there is a definite benefit to tracking what you eat and outcomes,” Susie said.
• These word combinations (n-grams) were evaluated and the most frequent combinations were selected for further analysis.

For example, the item in the previous dataset ‘’I love this app and it’s easy to use’’ is converted into the word array “love app easy use,” which was used as such for further analysis. Hidden costs and inadequate communication about the cost of using the app are some of the main reasons reported for users to stop using an app [8]. We also identified these issues as a source of numerous complaints from users leaving app reviews, along with the users’ inability to get their money refunded. Therefore, to retain users and keep them satisfied and loyal, an app should provide adequate, clear, and respectful communication regarding the costs that may be incurred through app use (eg, paid premium versions, in-app purchases, refund policies). Lifesum is the leading global healthy eating platform, founded on the belief that food fuels life. Lifesum is democratising healthy eating by empowering people with tools to understand their personal nutritional needs.

Would have been a perfect app but becomes utterly useless when trying to input my own foods. Everyone I enter the nutritional info it changes everything I put in to insane numbers like 2800 calories for cottage cheese. Top 50 “positive” trigrams (most frequently mentioned trigrams with ratings over 4). Weird, so it will add the activity but not the calories until maybe later? That’s odd – I’d try and fiddle with the app from your computer- I find it’s much easier to configure. I redid my goal recently and there were a few settings that I adjusted and it pulls data very accurately.

Links to NCBI Databases

Noom includes a psychology-based weight loss course, a series of 10 mini-courses that you can complete at your own pace. The app also allows you to partner with a nutrition professional who can review your uploads and provide advice along the way. DALLAS — When it comes to tracking food online, Health & Wellness Reporter Sonia Azad asked WFAA viewers which app they love the most. Easy to check total carb, fat and protein content and individual food values so I can make better choices next day. These two trigrams would then be added to the trigrams extracted from other reviews, resulting in a total of 744,808 trigrams from 72,084 reviews.

Lose It:

The way the information is presented; the usability of the app; the degree to which it engages and connects users; and its effectiveness, timeliness, design, and functionality are also important considerations [27]. A deeper analysis of user reviews of apps can lead to better knowledge of desired features and user preferences, and ideally increase the usability, appeal, and effectiveness of the app in achieving users’ health and nutrition goals [7]. These aspects require more academic research into user reviews [22], especially as functionality and appearance often have greater contributions to the popularity of dieting apps than the quality of the information provided by the app [28]. App developers and companies have recognized the value of user reviews and frequently examine these reviews to improve the user experience. Most mobile health apps are free to use, with the option to upgrade profiles to paid premium options (for more features or personalized advice).

Topic Modeling

For the second iteration, we again reprogrammed the script to repeatedly run in this range, this time increasing by 1 to more accurately determine the best score. The best coherence (0.646) was achieved with 11 topics (Figure 2, Table 2). Since both the topical n-grams identification and topic modeling approaches have the same preprocessing steps, the same preprocessed dataset was used in both methods. For these tasks, we used the Python programming language in combination with its data science–specific tools (ie, libraries) that made this process possible given the large amount of data. The Python libraries numpy and pandas, which are well known in the data science community, were used extensively throughout the process, along with several other libraries, each specialized for a particular task.

What App for Tracking Nutrition?

Second, lemmatization was performed, which is a process of grouping the inflected forms of words so that they can be analyzed as a single item. These forms are identified by the lemma of the word (ie, both “tracking” and “tracks” share the same lemma and become “track”). The lemmatization algorithm considers the morphological analysis of the words during data preparation [42]. Finally, we applied part-of-speech tagging, which determines the category of the word (eg, noun, adjective, adverb, verb) based on both its definition and context [43]. We were only interested in English reviews at this point since our dataset contains reviews in different languages unimeal scam such as Portuguese, Spanish, and German. These reviews make up about 12% of our dataset (9576 reviews), and it was safer to remove them than to translate them into English.

Topical Trigrams

The initial free download and use make these apps easily disposable and users’ decision to switch between them is widespread [24]. This drives app developers’ interest in listening to users’ comments, complaints, ideas, and suggestions [25]. In reviews, users are text producers for other potential consumers, businesses, and society at large.

Add to Collections

Foodnoms is available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch with an optional paid subscription. While Susie doesn’t track food for herself, she does recommend daily logging for most of her clients. She says logging your food provides accountability and awareness of portion control. Not sure what’s going on however ever since paid ads keep popping up the app has just gone down hill. I’ve used this app for 3 years now and am seriously looking at using another app. I tried it to give it a chance thinking it was what I was looking for, but it wasn’t.

Healthy eating.

“Yes I see value for certain people- but on the flip side for my clients with any type of disordered eating, it is a major trigger, to say every single thing you’ve had to eat today,” she said. “Research shows there is a definite benefit to tracking what you eat and outcomes,” Susie said.

Trusted By Thousands of Users

Despite extensive literature on nutrition apps and individual usage patterns in health and nutrition research, the investigation of these apps from the perspective of user-generated content (ie, publicly available user reviews) is in its infancy. Previous research has mainly focused on app development issues and feature evaluation to make apps more accessible and user-friendly (eg, [7,31]). Numerous studies have examined consumer opinions of existing apps through surveys, interviews, and qualitative content analysis. This existing research captured an overall positive assessment/evaluation of the available apps (ie, app liking), as well as users’ perceptions of these apps as helpful and easy to use (eg, [8,15,50]). These findings were supported by our results, as was the importance of the diet-tracking feature to users [8] and the deterrent effect of ads [8,15]. To improve the understanding of user opinions on diet-tracking apps, this study was performed based on the collection and analysis of the textual reviews and numerical ratings that users leave for these apps.

Mobile apps have become an important source of information for their users. A study conducted in the United States showed that more than half of the population using a mobile phone has downloaded at least one health-related app. Most of these were fitness and nutrition apps, which also have the highest reported usage rates [7,8]. Since topic modeling is an unsupervised method, it was not constrained by certain predefined standards (ie, number of topics). This high number was randomly chosen to find the optimal range for our topic number. This analysis revealed that the number of topics with the best coherence score was between 6 and 13 (Figure 1).