NOURISH
Neurotech-Optimized User Response for Improved Sustainable Health

Poor dietary choices can lead to an array of individual and societal problems. At the
individual level these manifest as obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and mental
health disorders. While societal challenges include healthcare expenses stemming from
diet-related diseases. Moreover, the excessive consumption of meat and processed foods accelerates environmental degradation, contributing to problems like deforestation, water pollution, food availability and affordability, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. In the contemporary landscape, how can we leverage physiology and AI, as imagined in the future scenario, to decode the brain’s response to food and understand human health as the central actor in the food value chain? Is there an ethically viable approach to understanding individuals' inclinations and behaviors, thereby guiding them toward healthier food choices?

​

Starlab collaborates with Sanja Sikoparija in this project to develop tools and models to translate the emotional data gathered from participants' brains into artistic visualisation and sonification. This representation can teach users about their responses to food in an emotionally rooted manner, and can enrich and tailor the multisensory context experienced while eating, aiming to alter participants' moods and enhance their overall sensory experience through neurofeedback. Ultimately, this process can reinforce positive emotional associations with healthy food choices and may serve, after appropriate regulatory approval, as a therapy for eating-related disorders. 

​

The objectives of NOURISH are the following:

• Starlab will deliver a proof of concept, along with the necessary expertise to train the new AI models for recognising users' emotional and health responses to food. 

• Sanja Sikoparija will create immersive and bio-reactive visualisations derived from the decoded real-time EEG brain activity to transcribe the immense flow of data and knowledge represented through the brain’s responses to food and create a multisensory experience for the prototype user.