Susan Schembre
Georgetown University, DC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Eating too much saturated fat and added sugar is a leading cause of early death among U.S. adults, contributing to about 700,000 deaths a year.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
dietary assessment
ecological momentary assessment
mobile health
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Identify the foods that contribute the majority of saturated fat and added sugars in the American diet using recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data.
- Develop the mEMDA mobile app and analysis platform through user-centered design, with visual food images for portion-size estimation and built-in nutrient analysis.
- Determine which ecological momentary sampling approach works better for diet tracking: event-contingent sampling, where users report each eating occasion, or interval-contingent sampling, where users report at set times.
- Compare how accurately the optimized mEMDA app and the interviewer-assisted 24-hour dietary recall estimate energy intake from saturated fat and added sugars in a controlled-feeding study.
More about the research
Measuring what people actually eat is surprisingly hard. Standard methods, such as interviewer-assisted 24-hour recalls (24HR), in which a trained interviewer walks a person through everything they ate the previous day, are burdensome for both participants and researchers. They also depend on memory and may not capture eating as it happens in daily life. This project proposes a low-cost alternative. It is a mobile app based on ecological momentary assessment, a method that prompts people to report behavior in the moment, as they go about their day.
Why it matters
A low-burden, accurate way to track saturated fat and added sugar intake in near-real time could improve nutrition studies of diet-related disease, which contributes to many premature deaths among U.S. adults. Because the app could be adapted to give real-time feedback and to record meal context, it could also become a tool for helping people change their eating habits.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jiwoo Lee
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Describe the sites and participating families of the USDA Summer Food Service Program in the Twin Cities to evaluate how the program is currently delivered, using surveys of children and parents recruited at program sites.
Deanna Kaplan
Emory University, GA·Psychology·Early-career
Optimize the Fabla smartphone voice-diary app for major depressive disorder screening using co-design methods with community participants, including older adults.
Andre Miguel
Washington State University, WA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether rural smokers with alcohol use disorder who receive varenicline plus app-based contingency management submit more breathalyzer samples showing alcohol abstinence and non-heavy drinking days than those using a control app.
The school
Georgetown University: 14 labs on PI Pages, $377M a year on research, 206 research doctorates a year.
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