Eureka! Institutional Repository

The field of Information and Communications Technology is a dynamically changing domain that has been marking rapid growth in recent years. As a result of this significant progress, there has been developed a wide variety of nutrition applications targeting a vast range of users. However, the number of scientific studies evaluating the quality of these applications is limited, resulting in raising doubts about whether existing applications are of high quality and reliability and whether there are suitable scientific tools to assess their quality. The aim of this research was to explore scientific methods using appropriate evaluation indexes to assess the quality of nutrition software and applications. For this reason, the names of the applications which were used are not mentioned.In this paper, the quality of eight nutrition applications was examined using specific evaluation indexes. For the purposes of the research, a questionnaire was created and answered by twenty students between the ages of 18 and 25, who had previously used the applications. This questionnaire examined six evaluation indexes: Engagement, Aesthetics, Usability, Technological Features, Scientific Coverage, and SecurityAccountability. Additionally, the applications were qualitatively assessed by the author of this paper in terms of Scientific Coverage, Technological Features, Aesthetics, Usability, Security, Gamification, and content related to Behavior Change Techniques. Among the evaluated indexes, it was observed that Usability was the most significant criterion for users to continue using an application. It also appeared that the element of Scientific Coverage was insufficient in most applications, which was disapproved by users due to the lack of nutritional advice. These results are in agreement with the bibliography, increasing their validity. Moreover, the application rendered the best was also the one that fulfilled the qualitative criteria of the evaluation indexes more closely. This finding establishes the value of evaluation indexes as a suitable scientific tool for assessing the quality of nutrition applications.