Digital Tools for Healthy Eating in Underserved Populations

Dear Colleagues,

Digital tools—online platforms, social media, mobile apps, telehealth, artificial intelligence (AI), wearable self-monitoring, and digital communications (e.g., text messages, email)—can expand reach and engagement of underserved populations with digital health interventions. These tools can monitor in real time, personalize content, gamify learning, and adapt to users to optimize health messages and interventions. However, these digital tools can also result in unintended negative health consequences by promoting less healthy foods/beverages, rapidly spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, undermining social well-being, and threatening the security of personnel and financial information. Additionally, the use of digital tools in research and health education or outreach programs can maintain or widen digital divides. Geographic and socioeconomic barriers to high-speed internet and limited digital literacy limit access to health information and interventions among certain populations, including lower-income households and older adults. To fully benefit, individuals need reliable devices, preferably high-speed internet and adequate digital, electronic, nutrition, and food literacy. This access and literacy enable them to leverage digital tools to promote their own and their family’s health and well-being by accessing healthy food and consuming a healthy diet.

This Special Issue aims to gather original research and scholarly reviews (adhering to standards of quality and transparency) on the use of digital tools to access evidence-based food and nutrition information and to obtain healthy foods, with the goal of improving diet quality, eating behaviors, and diet-related strategies that promote health and well-being.

Articles could include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Understanding barriers to using digital tools.
• Exploring use of digital tools to promote diet quality and healthy food access.
• Ways to overcome barriers and challenges to digital tools and platforms to promote diet quality, health, well-being, and healthy food access.
• Leveraging digital tools in food assistance programs.
• Improving tools to assess and improve literacy and digital literacy.
• Policies to improve digital access, literacy, avoid misinformation and predatory advertising, and interventions to leverage digital interventions to improve diet and health.

Prof. Dr. Valerie B. Duffy
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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