CoDiet

Launched in 2023, the CoDiet project will trial new diet-monitoring technologies to improve our understanding of the relationship between the food we eat and common non-communicable diseases (NCD) such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity. The project will build upon this enhanced understanding to develop artificial intelligence tools to deliver personalised nutritional advice aimed at preventing these diseases, creating a healthier society for all.

Objectives

Led by AZTI, a research centre based in the Basque County, Spain, the EU- and UKRI-funded CoDiet project will address the aforementioned knowledge gaps and develop a bespoke artificial intelligence-based tool that can assess individual, diet-induced NCD risk and deliver personalised dietary advice.

The project builds upon research from Imperial College London, including the development of an intelligent, wearable camera and personalised nutrition. The camera is one of the tools to collect dietary information that the project will test. The camera is designed to be worn on the ear and passively record what the wearer eats; it will use novel computer vision and deep learning techniques to automatically recognise food types and estimate portion sizes.

This will be coupled with other technologies that help us understand how food is processed in the body, including analysis of the gut microbiome and metabolites in the urine.

The project will also develop a tool that will simulate change in NCDs in response to diet at the population level, with the goal of promoting the uptake of NCD-protective diets. Currently, efforts to tackle these issues on a population scale take a "one size fits all" approach, and the hope is that personalised dietary advice can lead to more effective results.

The contribution of our AIC researchers is in terms of understanding causality between nutrition and hormones using modern optimization methods.

Members of the consortium

The project includes scientists and researchers from 17 research and academic institutions across 10 countries, combining expertise across multiple scientific disciplines to deliver impact: AZTI (Spain), Czech Technical University (Czech Republic), Teagasc - Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Ireland), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Israel), CIC bioGUNE (Spain), University of Valencia (Spain), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), Bruker Biospin (Germany), Microcaya (Spain), Sciensano (Belgium), University of Trento (Italy), Consorcio Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red (CIBER) (Spain), Istituto Superiore di Sanita (Italy), National Institute for Health Development (Estonia), Imperial College London (UK), and the University of Leicester (UK).

Start date: 2023
End date: 2026
Call: HORIZON-CL6-2022-FARM2FORK-01
Project ID: 101084642
Project website: https://www.codiet.eu/
Project EU profile: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101084642