research project

Food Friend

In the Food Friend project, the partners will develop new methods and techniques to measure food intake in people. As this is an ITEA project, each country consortium within the international project will have its own focus. In the Netherlands we will have tube feeding as the primary use case. Tube feeding is where liquid food is delivered directly to the stomach or small intestine using a tube. 25% to 40% of all patients in European hospitals experience malnutrition. This leads to an increased chance of complicatons and slows recovery. In some cases, tube feeding is the solution. Sometimes the patient is well enough to leave the hospital but still needs to receive tube feeding at home. However, only 70% of the prescribed food is actually consumed. In this project we will investigate how that can be improved.

Food Friend Nutrini Nutricia

More information

To find out more, or if you think Noldus might be a good partner for your consortium, you can contact us directly.


The role of Noldus

Receiving tube feeding is obviously uncomfortable and not something that a person would chose to do if they could eat normally. However, there is relatively little known about the detals of the users' experience. That means that the information is not available to both improve the product and to give better information to the patients, to better prepare them. For Noldus, it is a challenge to develop tools to carry out such observations in the home situation with all the extra difficulties of data security and privacy, variable and unpredictable conditions such as lighting and sometimes fragile subjects. Noldus will further develop its suite of tools for measuring user experience so that they are better able to function in those circumstances.

Partners

This is part of a larger international project. The Netherlands have already decided to fund the project (in fact it was the highest ranking project all those submitted) and several other countries will decide in the coming months. The Dutch consortium consists of:

  • Nutricia Research (Danone)
  • Maastricht Instruments BV (project leader)
  • Almende BV
  • Med Record BV
  • Noldus Information Technology BV
  • Maastricht University

Funding

This project is funded by the project partners and national governments as part of the ITEA-3 program.

Itea3 logo for in text