Combining data-driven and domain knowledge components in an intelligent assistant to build personalized menus

In this paper, some new components that have been integrated in the Diet4You system for the generation of nutritional plans are introduced. Negative user preferences have been modelled and introduced in the system. Furthermore, the cultural eating styles originated from the location where the user lives have been taken into account dividing the original menu plan in sub-plans. Each sub-plan is in charge to optimize one of the meals of one day in the personal menu of the user. The main latent reasoning mechanism used is case-based reasoning, which reuses previous menu configurations according to the nutritional plan and the corresponding hard constraints and the user preferences to meet a personalized recommendation menu for a given user. It uses the cognitive analogical reasoning technique in addition to ontologies, nutritional databases and expert knowledge. The preliminary results with some examples of application to test the new contextual components have been very satisfactory according to the evaluation of the experts.This work has been partially supported by the project Diet4You (TIN2014-60557-R), the Spanish Thematic Network MAPAS [TIN2017-90567-REDT (MINECO/FEDER EU)], and the Consolidated Research Group Grant from AGAUR (Generalitat de Catalunya) IDEAI-UPC (AGAUR SGR2017-574).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Generating complete menus from nutritional prescriptions by using advanced CBR and Real Food Databases

Prevention and nutrition are key issues to guarantee a healthy lifestyle and are in the kernel of the new paradigm of patient-centered medicine. A healthy diet protects against risk factors of a large number of chronic diseases and contribute to delay the disease appearance in the general population. More and more, making right diets is becoming essential from the health point of view. However, nutritionists design diets on the specific needs of each patient, using their accumulated experience and there are no well-formalized support mechanisms for such activity. The project Diet4You proposes the creation of an intelligent decision support system oriented to the adaptive and dynamic preparation of personalized diets for the specific individuals of general population, having or not, one or more diseases, by taking into account all the information available on the person. The diets will be built by considering the characteristics of the person, their health conditions, their habits and eventual drugs intake and their genetic information, which until now were not taken into account. The Diet4You tool is a hybrid system interacting several components in a complex way. One of those components is a subsystem able to compose complete menus, for a certain period of time, based on the nutritional prescriptions given by the nutritionists, in terms of balance of different families of nutrients. This component is based on a a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) engine that adaptively creates menus with breakfast, lunch and dinner on the bases of real food databases containing dishes with their nutritional composition. In this work, this component of the whole system is presented, described and tested.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Generating complete menus from nutritional prescriptions by using advanced CBR and Real Food Databases

Prevention and nutrition are key issues to guarantee a healthy lifestyle and are in the kernel of the new paradigm of patient-centered medicine. A healthy diet protects against risk factors of a large number of chronic diseases and contribute to delay the disease appearance in the general population. More and more, making right diets is becoming essential from the health point of view. However, nutritionists design diets on the specific needs of each patient, using their accumulated experience and there are no well-formalized support mechanisms for such activity. The project Diet4You proposes the creation of an intelligent decision support system oriented to the adaptive and dynamic preparation of personalized diets for the specific individuals of general population, having or not, one or more diseases, by taking into account all the information available on the person. The diets will be built by considering the characteristics of the person, their health conditions, their habits and eventual drugs intake and their genetic information, which until now were not taken into account. The Diet4You tool is a hybrid system interacting several components in a complex way. One of those components is a subsystem able to compose complete menus, for a certain period of time, based on the nutritional prescriptions given by the nutritionists, in terms of balance of different families of nutrients. This component is based on a a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) engine that adaptively creates menus with breakfast, lunch and dinner on the bases of real food databases containing dishes with their nutritional composition. In this work, this component of the whole system is presented, described and tested.Peer Reviewe