Singapore's Alexandra Hospital is using AI (artificial intelligence) to track patients’ nutritional intake.
The solution, AI Food Scanner from Nuvilab, a food tech startup, scans each patient's meal tray to analyse individual food intake and nutrients.
The hospital said the scanning process takes less than a second per scan, significantly improving the efficiency of meal recording and collection tasks for their medical staff.
On weighing the amount of food served and the amount of food left by patients as a baseline and comparing how much the AI measurements differed from the nurses’ charting, the healthcare facility said the AI solution could track meals with an average accuracy of 95 percent.
Alexandra Hospital is part of Singapore’s National University Health System (NUHS) with 326 hospital beds.
It follows a 24-hour recall method, which involves interviewing patients to record food and water intake in the past 24 hours to monitor patients’ consumption rate, calories and nutrients, and more.
Accurate nutritional tracking is essential for patients to recover quickly, but it can be time-consuming as one nurse is responsible for multiple patients, the hospital said.
The system has been piloted for around seven weeks leading to better work time efficiency for nurses.
The hospital said it is now planning to deploy food scanners throughout its expanding 1400-bed facility by 2028.
