Intelligent nutrition service for personalized dietary guidelines and lifestyle intervention

Abstract

Effective dietary guidelines are essential to combat various chronic diseases. This study aimed to develop an intelligent diet management service for providing personalized dietary guidelines. Unlike existing methods that merely follow dogmatic nutrition guidelines, we proposed a flexible personalized service selection and composition method considering various individual requirements to dynamically deliver a fine-grained meal plan. In addition, intelligent input, which aims to revolutionize the way people on diet selection, is introduced to reduce the users' efforts in food searching. The intelligent input employs image recognition techniques alongside onboard nutritional information to give feedback as to whether a particular food/dish is appropriate or not for a user on a specific diet. Users can thus interact with the diet management system more easily and intuitively via the intelligent input technique. The services generated by the proposed method are expected to potentially improve the overall health and make behavioral change toward healthier life style. © 2011 IEEE.