Personalized Nutrition Assessing Expert System
Asmabee Khan1, Prof. Sachin Deshpande2, Amiya Kumar Tripathy3
1Asmabee Khan, Department of Computer Engineering, Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, Wadala, Mumbai.
2Prof. Sachin Deshpande, Department of Computer Engineering, Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, Wadala, Mumbai.
3Amiya Kumar Tripathy, Department of Computer Engineering, Don Bosco Institute Technology, Vidyavihar, Mumbai.
Abstract: Personalized nutrition is the concept of adapting food to individual needs. While it has become apparent that consumers respond differently to diet, depending on their genetic makeup, lifestyle, and environment, the related knowledge and understanding remain fragmented. In this project, we aim to design expert recommendation system to deal with problems associated with lack of knowledge of nutrition, to aware people about the importance of healthy living, to prevent diseases, and to improve QoL (Quality of Life). This system is being designed by keeping in mind both the Users or Patients and Doctors or Nutritionists/Dietitian. The user or patient will be able to monitor their daily intake, to identify the possibility of disease due to deficiency, and to enhance QoL. This system will enable the nutritionists/dietitian or doctor to track their patient’s condition without personally visiting them. The advantage of the system will able to use by both patient and doctor, so that patient can take appropriate measure through messaging and it can also act as a Nutrition Assessment System in hospitals.
Keywords—Nutrition assessing; Nutrition Counseling; Personalized Nutrition; Expert System.
Introduction
Diet monitoring is one of the most important aspects in preventative health care that aims to reduce various health risks 1. Healthy lifestyle is an important requirement for people, which is obtained from balanced nutrition. Imbalanced nutrition increases the risk of health problems. Balanced nutrition means the difference between nutrition needed and nutrition intake must be as minimum as possible 2.
Nutrition focuses on how to protect the body from disease with a healthy diet. Human body receives nutrition from the food consumed. The major classes of nutrients are: carbohydrates, fats, minerals, proteins, vitamins, fibers, and water. All these nutrients are necessary for human body but in varying quantities. Poor health or nutritional deficiency occurs due to an inadequate amount of a particular nutrient or group of nutrients 3.
Personalized health-care and diets have gained great attention with the rise of Nutrigenetics studies. It is believed that all molecules involved in human metabolism are controlled directly or indirectly by genes and therefore the health of individuals can be optimized through personalized dietary advice 4.
Dietary counseling is primarily based on the interaction between a user (customer/patient) and a nutritionist (service provider). The nutritionist applies experience and expert knowledge to the patient’s data, in order to identify possible nutrients and trigger factors responsible for the patient’s symptoms. Usually, this data, ranging from patients’ food over medical records up to physical activity profiles, is recorded manually by multiple groups of persons in different formats and extents 5.
Literature Survey
i) PERSON-Personalized Expert Recommendation System for Optimized Nutrition: In this paper, we proposed a potential architecture of a personalized expert recommendation system for optimized nutrition (PERSON) with direct recommendation of products based on individual genes. Deep Long short-term memory (DLSTM) is applied as our grocery product categorization model, while its performance is compared with CNNs’. The categorized grocery products are compared to their own group and recommended to the consumer with different filters based on individual genetic phenotype. It is demonstrated that the interpretation of genetic data can be simplified through the application of nudging daily decisions such as grocery shopping. This is the optimization using GA to evaluate a fitness score and thresholds for recommendation based on nutrition value. The contribution of this paper includes a novel architecture of the expert system, utilization of DLSTM for the first time on grocery product categorization and the implementation of a new recommendation system with genetic algorithm 4.
ii) DiDiER – Digitized Services in Dietary Counselling for People with Increased Health Risks Related to Malnutrition and Food Allergies: In this paper, the developed system addresses two groups, the patients as customers and the nutritionists as service providers. Both groups have to exchange documents with physicians, hospitals and health insurances. Correspondingly, the system consists of two main components for each group. On the one hand, there is the service platform, used by the service provider, and on the other hand, there is the secure home cloud, used by the customer. The service platform will be cloud based and acts as the central point for service discovery and secure data exchange. It supports the nutritionists by gathering, analyzing and managing patient specific data and will allow for the instruction and supervision of patients during therapy. In addition, the platform will include interfaces to interact with the patient management systems in hospitals or medical practices. The secure home cloud will be bound to a physical device – a small home server – that will be installed at home and can be connected to sensors such as a heart rate sensor, activity tracker or scale. It acts as a digital safe for the patient’s data und supports data analysis through so-called smart services that are initiated by the service providers through the service platform. Through a patient specific user interface (e.g. tablet) the patient will be able to manage an activity as well as a food & symptoms diary, will be reminded of therapeutic events and can easily and securely share data (e.g. analysis results).
The system ensures that users retain full control of their data. The process of service provision with the system will contain the following four steps: Identification: The patient determines that there is a problem and contacts a physician for referral to a nutritionist. An appointment with a nutritionist (online or face-to-face) clarifies which kind of data the nutritionist needs for analysis; Acquisition: The patient acquires the required data over a given time period, typically several weeks, using the home cloud, supported by smart sensor systems; Analysis: After data acquisition, the nutritionist selects the kind of analysis (smart service) needed, the patient permits the smart service to run and provides the nutritionist with access to the results; Therapy: The nutritionist creates and provides a nutrition and activity plan and, if necessary, accomplishes food challenges or elimination diets in patients with allergies. The process iterates with step 2 for the supervision 5.
iii) NutritionRush – A Serious Game to Support People with the Awareness of Their Nutrition Intake: NutritionRush tries to deliver a new serious game approach to raise awareness about nutrition. This serious game was developed for mobile devices, where the player can navigate an avatar within a jump & run environment. This game contains different levels with different goals. The levels are: Level 1 – Collect all food in this level to get to know the overall game and its controls; Level 2 – Collect your personal daily consumption of calories; and Level 3 – Collect a reduced number of your daily consumption of calories, to gain better knowledge about your BMI (#IR13). It was created together with a nutrition expert and focuses on information about proteins, carbs, fat vitamins and the overall energy transformation. Based on this prototype a larger evaluation with potential users and other nutrition experts was carried out. This evaluation ended with different additional requirements and a concept for the improvement of the NutritionRush prototype 6.
iv) Pratibhojan – An alarm based personalized nutrition recommendation system: This paper has the proposed system that aims to design a personalized diet recommendation system supported with an alarm reminder for women in the age group of 40-50. With the help of this system, women can gain access to diet recipes based on some standard inputs. The system thereby relieves women from the burden of having to identify the right diet for their condition and will thereby help improve the nutritional status of households. The proposed system aims at providing good nourishment to these individuals. An additional advantage of the proposed system is the alarm reminder for food. With the help of this system, women will be able to obtain proper diet recommendations at the right time, thus helping them eat proper food as per their body condition and nutritional needs 3.
v) DietNama – The Way to Nutritious Diet: The proposed system in this paper is a personalized disease prediction and nutrition recommendation system supported with an alarm based reminder. The proposed system aims to predict diseases and provide diet recommendations to individuals based on some standard inputs such as allergies, symptoms of illnesses. Based on these inputs, the system predicts disease and outputs diet recipes and the user has to select them. After the selection of meal, the system will process the input and will apply data mining algorithm on the built-in database and then display a list of recommended dishes to the user. Thus, the system will relieve general users from the burden of having to identify the right recipes for their condition and will thereby help improve the nutritional status of households 7.
Existing System
One of the most popular tool for personalized nutrition is SuperTracker 8. SuperTracker is an online food and physical activity tracking tool available on the web. It allows individuals to track their food intake in the dietary guidelines put out annually by the USDA. It has 6 different sections, which are Food-A-Pedia: Look up nutrition info for over 8,000 foods and compare foods side-by-side; Food tracker: Track the foods you eat and compare to your nutrition targets; Physical Activity Tracker: Enter your activities and track progress as you move; My Weight Manager: Get weight management guidance; enter your weight and track progress over time; My Top 5 Goals: Choose up to 5 personal goals; sign up for tips and support from your virtual coach; Group Challenges: Group Leaders can create a healthy eating and/or physical activity challenge. But this system does not provide any contacts with Nutritionists/Dietitian to take appropriate advice and it cannot be used as Nutrition Assessment System in Hospitals.
Another Android app is Calorie Counter & Food Diary by MyNetDiary is one of several popular food diary apps. To get the most out of the tool, enter your nutritional goals or weight loss goals, and use features within the app to plan your meals and monitor your adherence. Useful features include the ability to scan supermarket barcodes to get nutritional information that helps you make smart choices while grocery shopping, and the tracking of macronutrients such as carbohydrates, protein, and fat. In fact, you can track your intake of 45 separate nutrients.
What makes this app stand apart is an elegant user interface that makes entering your food intake fast and easy. This is important because people are bound to abandon a food diary app when it becomes too troublesome to use. This app also lets you track your fitness regimen, and is compatible with fitness trackers like FitBit. For some users, cost can be a concern, because full functionality is not unlocked without an annual subscription of $40 per month and another drawback is that it also does not provide any fields to connect with nutrition expert.
Another popular nutrients database and diet tracker is Nutrients. Nutrients contains the nutritional info for a wide range of foods and a food journal which makes tracking your food intake simple. One favorite feature is the ability to enter your recipes, and get an instant nutritional breakdown. One deficiency as of this writing is lack of availability on Android. Some reviewers have also complained that the nutritional browser lacks some foods, it is just focused on intake monitoring and does not have physical activity tracker, and there’s no section available to interact with nutrition expert and take advice.
All the above mentioned systems are quite impressive as far as technology is concerned which helped us come to a solution for our problem statement and well defined objective of our system.
Proposed System
In this project, we aim to design expert recommendation system to deal with problems associated with lack of knowledge of nutrition, to aware people about the importance of healthy life, to prevent diseases, and to improve QoL (Quality of Life).
Personalized nutrition is the concept of adapting food to individual needs. While it has become apparent that consumers respond differently to diet, depending on their genetic makeup, lifestyle, and environment, the related knowledge and understanding remain fragmented.
This system is being designed by keeping in mind both the Users or Patients and Doctors or Nutritionists/Dietitian. The user or patient will be able to monitor their daily intake, to identify the possibility of disease due to deficiency, and to enhance QoL. This system will enable the nutritionists/dietitian or doctor to track their patient’s condition without personally visiting them. The advantage of the system will able to use by both patient and doctor, so that patient can take appropriate measure through messaging and it can also act as a Nutrition Assessment System in hospitals.
Figure 1: System Architecture
Summary
The proposed system will be a Personalized Expert Recommendation System that eases users/patients to assess their intake monitoring, to identify the possibility of disease due to deficiency and to enhance QoL and take appropriate preventive measures. And it will also act as a Nutrition Assessment System in hospitals which will relieve the burden on doctors and Dietitian/Nutritionists head because they don’t have to switch between different applications to counseling their patients within the hospital and outside as well.
References
1 Yoke Jia (Jelyn) Thong, Thuong Nguyen, Qing Zhang, Mohan Karunanithi and Lei Yu, “Predicting Food Nutrition Facts Using Pocket-size Near-Infrared Sensor”, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2017 39th Annual International Conference of the IEEE.
2 Knowledge, Information and Creativity Support Systems (KICSS), 2016 11th International Conference of the IEEE. Fidelson Tanzil, Lili A. Wulandhari, Sani M. Isa, “Artificial Bee Colony — Based for dietary recommendation in daily nutrition requirements”
3 Amiya Kumar Tripathy, Ditty Varghese, A.J Sudhakaran, Mohit Deorukhkar, Stacy Bardeskar, “Pratibhojan: An alarm based personalized nutrition recommendation system”.
4 Chih-Han Chen, Maria Karvela, Mohammadreza Sohbati, Thaksin Shinawatra, and Christofer Toumazou,”PERSON-Personalized Expert Recommendation System for Optimized Nutrition”, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and System 2017.
5 Patrick Elfert, Marco Eichelberg, Johannes Tröger, Jochen Britz, Jan Alexandersson, Daniel Bieber, Jürgen Bauer, Susanne Teichmann, Ludwig Kuhn, Martin Thielen, Janina Sauer, Alexander Münzberg, Norbert Rösch, Julia Woizischke, Rebecca Diekmann, Andreas Hein, “DiDiER – Digitized Services in Dietary Counselling for People with Increased Health Risks Related to Malnutrition and Food Allergies”, 22nd IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communication (ISCC 2017): Workshops – ICTS4eHealth 2017.
6 Rene Baranyi, Bernhard Steyrer, Lukas Lechner, Gevher N. Agbektas, Nadja Lederer, Thomas Grechenig, “NutritionRush – A Serious Game to Support People with the Awareness of Their Nutrition Intake”, 978-1-5090-5482-4/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE.
7 Ditty Varghese, Shafaque Fatma Syed, Richa Butala, Vrushali Katkar, Swati Jadhav, “DietNama – The Way to Nutritious Diet”
8 Supertracker. Online. Available at https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/ (Accessed on Dec. 13, 2017).
