Food and Nutrition Systems Dashboards: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The rapid expansion of food and nutrition information requires new ways of data sharing and dissemination. Interactive platforms integrating data portals and visualization dashboards have been effectively utilized to describe, monitor, and track information related to food and nutrition; however, a comprehensive evaluation of emerging interactive systems is lacking. We conducted a systematic review on publicly available dashboards using a set of 48 evaluation metrics for data integrity, completeness, granularity, visualization quality, and interactivity based on 4 major principles: evidence, efficiency, emphasis, and ethics. We evaluated 13 dashboards, summarized their characteristics, strengths, and limitations, and provided guidelines for developing nutrition dashboards. We applied mixed effects models to summarize evaluation results adjusted for interrater variability. The proposed metrics and evaluation principles help to improve data standardization and harmonization, dashboard performance and usability, broaden information and knowledge sharing among researchers, practitioners, and decision makers in the field of food and nutrition, and accelerate data literacy and communication.

Keywords: dashboard evaluation; data visualization; nutrition and food surveillance; nutrition data quality; quality metrics.

FIGURE 1

A heatmap of dashboards’ evaluation results where metrics are arranged by principle, indicator, and subindicator. The metrics are shown in numbers, which are aligned with the metrics order in Table 2. The heatmap represents crude mean scores from 6 raters for each metric and each of the 13 dashboards with light yellow indicating a score of 1 and dark green indicating a score of 5. The crude scores with SD across all dashboards for each metric are shown in the second to last column. The average scores adjusted for rater and dashboard variability obtained from the mixed effects models are shown in the last column and under the name for each principle, indicator, and subindicator, accordingly. Dashboards are listed in descending order of overall performance scores aligned with Supplemental Table 1. The dashboard performance scores with SD adjusted for interrater variability is shown in the third and second to last row, and dashboard scores significantly different from the average score (P-value <0.05) are marked with asterisks. Intraclass correlation (ICC) scores for each dashboard are shown in the last row.