Location: Food Surveys Research Group
Project Number: 8040-10700-001-012-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 15, 2023
End Date: Sep 14, 2028
Objective:
The objective of this project is to review and evaluate current dietary assessment technologies and USDA’s Automated Multiple-Pass Method (AMPM) capabilities to enhance the collection of 24-hour dietary recalls of the U.S. population and implement findings for streamlining and disseminating population-level dietary data.
RTI, with USDA input, will modernize the AMPM into a streamlined, turn-key AMPM software system that integrates data collection and processing through incorporation of the functions and features of PIPS, FNDDS, and SURVEYNET. The new system will be advantageous for nutrition researchers and CDC in particular given NHANES’s sample of five thousand participants per data collection cycle.
The project will span five years. The work required across five project tasks described in Section 4 includes:
• Review of dietary assessment technologies, including tools/apps, programming languages, and software packages used to collect and process dietary recalls.
• Assessment of the AMPM system, including PIPs, FNDDS, and SURVEYNET to identify areas/features that can be revised and/or incorporated to improve the functionality of dietary recalls.
• Selection of state-of-the-art technological efficiencies for enhancing the AMPM.
• Evaluation and improvement of AMPM food and beverage questions, probes, and response options to enhance 24-hour dietary recall methodology.
• Assessment of the new AMPM system’s capabilities for integration into other dietary recall systems.
Approach:
The work to be performed is categorized into three main areas: (1) Dietary assessment technologies, including tools/apps, programming languages and software packages used to collect and process dietary recalls will be reviewed to identify capabilities that would enhance USDA’s Automated Multiple-Pass Method (AMPM), the 24hour dietary recall collection method, used in national dietary data collection in What We Eat In America (WWEIA), National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), as well as streamline operation and dissemination. (2) The AMPM method will be assessed to identify areas/features that can be revised/incorporated to improve the functionality to collect dietary recalls effectively and efficiently. A potential feature already identified for evaluation is expanding current autocoding capabilities using machine learning and contemporaneous calculation of nutrient profiles at time of collection, providing comprehensive dietary intake data including nutrient profiles of all reported food items. (3) The questions, probes, and response options as detailed in USDA’s AMPM will be evaluated to identify potential enhancements to the 24hour dietary recall methodology for food and beverage questions in the AMPM.
