ArticleDigital health
Large-scale loyalty card data in health research.
Article in Digital health. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review of supermarket automated electronic sales data for population dietary surveillance.Nutrition reviews · 2022Pooled it
- Carbon Isotope Ratios as Biomarkers for Added Sugar Intake: Fundamental Limitations that Constrain Valid Application.The Journal of nutrition · 2026Review
- Shopping Data for Population Health Surveillance: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Citizens' digital footprints to support health promotion at the local level-PUHTI study, Finland.European journal of public health · 2024Article
- Cohort profile: The Health, Food, Purchases and Lifestyle (SMIL) cohort - a Danish open cohort.BMJ open · 2024Article
- Tensorial Principal Component Analysis in Detecting Temporal Trajectories of Purchase Patterns in Loyalty Card Data: Retrospective Cohort Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Assessing household lifestyle exposures from consumer purchases, the My Purchases cohort.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Supermarket Transaction Records In Dietary Evaluation: the STRIDE study: validation against self-reported dietary intake.Public health nutrition · 2023Article
- Assessing the value of integrating national longitudinal shopping data into respiratory disease forecasting models.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Real-life experiments in supermarkets to encourage healthy dietary-related behaviours: opportunities, challenges and lessons learned.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2023Article
- Using Shopping Data to Improve the Diagnosis of Ovarian Cancer: Computational Analysis of a Web-Based Survey.JMIR cancer · 2023Article
- Fish, Seafood, and Fish Products Purchasing Habits in the Spanish Population during COVID-19 Lockdown.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Public attitudes towards sharing loyalty card data for academic health research: a qualitative study.BMC medical ethics · 2022Article
- Human exposome assessment platform.Environmental epidemiology (Philadelphia, Pa.) · 2021Article
- Understanding Barriers to Novel Data Linkages: Topic Modeling of the Results of the LifeInfo Survey.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
- Dietary Patterns Derived from UK Supermarket Transaction Data with Nutrient and Socioeconomic Profiles.Nutrients · 2021Article
- Article
- Characterization and Correction of Bias Due to Nonparticipation and the Degree of Loyalty in Large-Scale Finnish Loyalty Card Data on Grocery Purchases: Cohort Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Article
- Evidence from big data in obesity research: international case studies.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2020Article
- Alcohol expenditure in grocery stores and their associations with tobacco and food expenditures.BMC public health · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveTo study the characteristics of large-scale loyalty card data obtained in Finland, and to evaluate their potential and challenges in health research.
methodsWe contacted the holders of a certain loyalty card living in a specific region in Finland via email, and requested their electronic informed consent to obtain their basic background characteristics and grocery expenditure data from 2016 for health research purposes. Non-participation and the characteristics and expenditure of the participants were mainly analysed using summary statistics and figures.
resultsThe data on expenditure came from 14,595 (5.6% of those contacted) consenting loyalty card holders. A total of 68.5% of the participants were women, with an average age of 46 years. Women and residents of Helsinki were more likely to participate. Both young and old participants were underrepresented in the sample. We observed that annual expenditure represented roughly two-thirds of the nationally estimated annual averages. Customers and personnel differed in their characteristics and expenditure, but not so much in their most frequently bought items.
conclusionsLoyalty card data from a major retailer enabled us to reach a large, heterogeneous sample with fewer resources than conventional surveys of the same magnitude. The potential of the data was great because of their size, coverage, objectivity, and long periods of dynamic data collection, which enables timely investigations. The challenges included bias due to non-participation, purchases in other stores, the level of detail in product grouping, and the knowledge gaps in what is being consumed and by whom. Loyalty card data are an underutilised resource in research, and could be used not only in retailers' activities, but also for societal benefit.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.