Impact of nutritional and behavioral choices on preterm birth

United States has the highest rate of preterm births among industrialized countries. Our team (led by Mary Regan at UMD School of Nursing) hypothesized that a number of easily modifiable factors, such as nutrition, may be to blame. A key technical enabler that will make it possible for us to interrogate this hypothesis is a mechanism, based on our PlateMate system, for scalable nutritional analysis of food from meal photographs. We will use it to track the nutritional choices of 400 pregnant women for several months each. This is an exciting project for us because we are using recent insights from crowdsourcing to enable research of substantial societal importance that would not have been feasible otherwise.