Healthy Living Physical World Connection

There are more useful functions than price comparison when scanning a barcode with a mobile device.

Physical world connection helps patients track food intake, check nutrition

Food labels do not always contain the necessary information, and the patients needed a way to monitor their intake over the course of a day to make sure they did not exceed recommended levels of certain types of food and fluid, the researchers say.

Now the PDAs, loaded with programs that contain the food content information on the foods patients eat, could solve that problem. The handheld devices also will offer personalized information on how much phosphorus, potassium, sodium, calories, fluid and protein a patient should eat.

Right now the researchers are experimenting with using PDAs that can scan a product's barcode to learn the relevant nutritional information