Personalized Dietary Counseling System Using Harmony Rules in Tele-Care
István Vassányi, István Kósa, Balazs Pinter, Balázs Gaál · European Journal for Biomedical Informatics · 2014
Introduction: Lifestyle assessment, especially nutrition counseling may have a great impact on the health state of everybody.The MenuGene expert system provides services for the logging and assessment of nutrition and physical activity.Aim: This paper focuses on how the harmony of a dietary log can be analyzed using harmony rules.Such an assessment can be used to assess a log as well as drive an evolutionary search process that constructs a personalized menu.Methods: Expert knowledge is formalized in two parts, sets of foods and dishes and rules that fire at a pre-defined pattern of sets.To tackle the large rule search space, a simple conflict resolution strategy is used.Results: We implemented several hierarchies of sets to support the definition of rules, and also an Android based lifestyle assistant application.We validated the completeness of the dietary database in a survey.Conclusion: The system may prove very useful for a real improvement of the quality of life and general health state especially for patients with chronic diseases like diabetes.We plan to conduct clinical trials to prove this early next year.