Start of the DIGIQUITY4HEALTH project on healthier food choices in a digital environment
The DIGIQUITY4HEALTH project has officially started and was presented during the launch symposium From Bricks to Clicks on January 23 at Mindlabs. What opportunities and challenges exist if you want to encourage healthier food choices in a digital environment, such as on order and supermarket websites and in apps? And how do you ensure that by offering healthier options online, everyone can adopt a healthier lifestyle, including people with a lower socioeconomic status?
Ordering a meal online or ordering groceries through an app and having them delivered to your home. Consuming is increasingly happening online, including in the food industry. That we, as consumers, are influenced the moment we make a choice, we do not always realize, but it does happen. During the symposium, the speakers discussed important digital developments, for example, the unique possibilities of digital technologies by intervening, by instance, at an optimal moment (just-in-time) to make healthy choices easier.
Influencing consumers to make healthier choices than the ones they intended to order if presented at just the right time can benefit consumers' health. But does that work for everyone? Previous research has shown that many interventions work primarily with people of higher socioeconomic status, reinforcing existing health disparities between consumers of higher and lower socioeconomic statuses. A key question in the DIGIQUITY4HEALTH project is how digital technologies can be used for the benefit of vulnerable and less educated groups to counter health inequalities.
This question was discussed with scientists and practitioner stakeholders during panel sessions at the symposium. The practical implementation of new technologies and the ethical side of this were also discussed.
"The symposium marked a wonderful start to the project. The presence of participants from various academic disciplines and a range of public and private parties illustrated the broad support for this topic. During the panel discussions it was abundantly clear how crucial it is to involve various stakeholders in the research from an early stage, which turns out to be essential for the acceptance of interventions."
Dr. engineer Nynke van der Laan, Associate Professor of Digital Health Communication
About the project
The DIGIQUITY4HEALTH project is an ICON project (Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research) and part of the Academic Collaborative Center for Digital Health & Mental Wellbeing of Tilburg University. This means that, in the project, there is intensive and co-creative collaboration between different scientific disciplines and practice. The starting point is that the outcomes are relevant to both science and practice. Funding for the project was received from the Tilburg University Digital Sciences for Society Program.