Touch'n'Document - A Nutrition Management System on an NFC-tagged TFT-display

Self-reporting of patient data is a valuable tool for data capture in clinical trial studies and to support ailment treatment. However, traditional paper-based self-reporting is cost-and time-consuming and consequently suffers from low patient compliance. NFC-based electronic data capture methods allow a quick and easy self-reporting for patients and the real-time presentation of patient data enables direct medical intervention by physicians. Malnutrition, for example can be attenuated by continuous medical supervision of nutrition data. Consequently, we introduce an NFC-based prototype system called Touch'n'Document (TnD) that supports automatic aggregation and measurement of self-reported nutrition status. The hardware of TnD consists of a TFT-display that was outfitted with an array of NFC-tags on the backside. These allow an NFC-enabled mobile phone to be used as an input device to any software system, running on the TFT-display. The patients simply have to touch the display with their mobile device to log into the system and report and analyze their current nutrition. This ensures an adequate usability of the nutrition management system, especially for non tech-savvy or physically impaired patients, consequently increasing patient compliance. The technical feasibility, benefits, limitations and future research prospects of the prototype system are discussed in this manuscript.