Scientists using artificial intelligence and camera glasses seek Irish volunteers for diet study

The smart glasses record the type of food people eat and the portion sizes.

Scientists using artificial intelligence (AI) and camera glasses to look for links between what people eat and conditions such as heart disease and diabetes are seeking Irish participants for an international study.

The project is developing AI tools for giving people personalised diet advice and help prevent some of these diseases.

The Codiet project includes a Cork arm with Teagasc and APC Microbiome Ireland — a world leading Research Ireland centre at University College Cork (UCC).

Professor Orla O’Sullivan said: “It is all about prevention, stopping people getting sick.  We are working with AI which can be so scary to all of us but the question is how can we use it for health? How can we use AI for our benefit rather than just in algorithms which are throwing us up scary ads on Tiktok? How can we use AI for good?” 

Prof O’Sullivan is senior computational biologist at Teagasc and principal investigator with VistaMilk and APC Microbiome Ireland.

“One diet isn’t going to suit all,” she said.

“We all know there’s been a big rise in what we call non-communicable diseases — that aren’t inherited — Type 2 Diabetes, some cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, obesity.” 

She added: “These are lifestyle illnesses that are driven by diet in a big way.” 

Phase one of the study saw participants in Ireland and abroad record their food for 12 weeks.

Camera glasses

They were given wearable smart technology in the form of bespoke camera glasses.

Prof O’Sullivan said: “It’s the size of a USB key, you can put it onto your own glasses. The idea is this recorded everything you ate.” 

They are encrypted for privacy, she said. “They only record food. Anything else is blurred out.” 

The glasses recorded the type of food people ate and portion sizes. They were used in preference to food diaries as they get around the problem of people forgetting to record snacks.

“The purpose of that observational trial was to build AI models and we are going to use these to predict what someone’s diet should be,” she said.

The analysis includes looking at the microbe ecosystem found in human intestines, known as the gut microbiome.

There will have an interventional trial next. "We hope to start recruiting for at the end of spring. That will be run in Cork in conjunction with Atlantia Clinical Trials," Prof O'Sullivan said.

This will include two large groups of people. 

“One group of people who we will give a personalised diet to, and another group who will go on a standardised diet,” she said.

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Professor Gary Frost, Head of Nutrition Research at Imperial College London, said it is “very difficult” to understand the links between diet and disease.

“One of the major gaps in our knowledge is accurate understanding of what people eat in their day to day lives,” he said.

The project is focused on addressing this problem, he said.

“(It) brings together a number of new technologies to address this shortcoming," he said. “By doing this we believe we will be able to design new individual-based policies to prevent common lifestyle-related diseases." 

The project includes researchers from seventeen research and academic institutions across 10 countries. 

More details including sign-up information can be found at Codiet.eu