[In this blog from Data for Decisions to Expand Nutrition Transformation, R4D’s Alexandra Farina, Yashodhara Rana and Felicity Nelson share insights from their landscape analysis of nutrition trends and data innovations and share examples of three of the most popular data innovation categories: mobile solutions, artificial intelligence and citizen generated data.]
Data innovations hold promise for addressing challenges across all aspects of the nutrition data value chain (DVC). The time is opportune to leverage new data sources, methods, and technology due to the increased need for high quality and real-time data brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent convenings such as the UN World Data Forum in October 2021 have also featured data innovations as a key theme to showcase the potential of new solutions.
Given the limited work around data innovations for nutrition, DataDENT conducted a landscape analysis of trends and opportunities for nutrition data innovations. We reviewed data innovations developed in or after 2015 across the following nutrition domains—diet, food security, food environment, food fortification, micronutrients, and nutrition status.
To guide our review, we first identified data innovation categories and their sub-categories which we found to be most prominent in the broader data innovation space (Figure 1). We then mapped the 60+ nutrition data innovations found in our search to these categories. We found a significant number of nutrition data innovations are mobile solutions, digitalization, or artificial intelligence. We also found the majority of innovations to be related to nutrition status and diet data, with comparatively less around food fortification data. Finally, most innovations influence the collection, analysis, and translation of data and less so which data to collect.
