FINE: Food INtake Ecosystem

Why this project?

There is already plenty of ‘knowledge’ about the positive impact of balanced, accessible, and adapted diets on the health of the person consuming that food. However, this positive impact can only be realised if the food offered is also consumed. To get an idea of nutritional intake within the healthcare context, it is necessary to monitor what is eaten at a personal level in a user-friendly way. This way, insights into the food losses left on the plate are also immediately gained.

It is therefore important that healthcare providers have a data platform and associated tool that allow for user-friendly information capture and data linking. This data-driven approach is still in its infancy among many actors in (the food industry and) healthcare. Currently, data capture is often inefficient (e.g. manual capture) and paper records often still form the basis of this whole, resulting in a lack of holistic insights. In addition, each healthcare institution collects its data in its own way in its own system. Data only becomes interesting when you combine it with other data sources in a data ecosystem. So we can see some huge potential here. Data sharing accelerates innovations in and across sectors and delivers new solutions. Actors thus integrate all relevant data sources into their own ecosystem. Therefore, in this project, we choose to facilitate the development of a data ecosystem for food and healthcare. We see capturing food intake data and linking it to other data sources in food and healthcare as the first building block here. This is our first step towards a health data space.

Methodology and expected results

FINE is a collective research, development, and dissemination project (COOCK+ type) with the aim of building a data ecosystem for food and healthcare through which we want to motivate Flemish companies in the food and healthcare sectors to start working with this knowledge and technology. We aim to clearly highlight the potential of data capture using an optimised tool to monitor food intake in a healthcare context, thus encouraging a more data-driven approach. For this, data capture will be done around food intake, after which the possibility of data links/data coupling will be looked at to build an ecosystem that’s ready for a data space. This provides an opportunity to optimise the quality of meals and tailor them to the needs of those in need of healthcare, thus aiming to reduce the overall healthcare burden and food losses.

Target group

The target groups are, on the one hand, from the healthcare sector – residential care centres and hospitals and their commercial kitchens – and, on the other hand, from the food sector – companies (interested in) supplying the healthcare sector. There is also a target group of technology providers offering solutions to the healthcare and food sector on meal management, data management, etc.

Project partners

Flanders’ FOOD manages and coordinates the project. This intercluster project (MEDVIA) will be executed in collaboration with ILVO (Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food), VIVES University, and IMEC. The FINE project is part of the cooperation initiative Nutrition Health Care System (NuHCaS). NuHCaS takes a systemic approach towards uniting the food, health and care sectors in the pursuit of knowledge development and research on how food affects our health.

Keen to join?

The project launched in March 2024 and runs through February 2027 (3-year project duration), and participation will remain open during this period. Would you, as a food company, healthcare actor, or technology provider, like to be kept informed about this project? For more information and conditions, please contact the project coordinators.