Including hard restrictions into Diet4You Menu Planner

Abstract

Healthy life-styles have become a keystone of the modern health approach, according to its strategic role in preventing the development of some chronic diseases and maintaining the quality of life of persons. More and more, nutrition is central to guarantee a healthy life-style; following the proper diet is becoming essential from the health point of view. However, the current state of the art in nutrition is based on a design of diets made by nutritionists on the specific needs of each person, using their accumulated experience and some basic tools like tables of food decomposition. Well-formalized mechanisms supporting specific diet design are still limited. The project Diet4You proposes an intelligent decision support system oriented to the adaptive and dynamic preparation of personalized diets fitting nutritional prescriptions and adapted to specific health situation of a person, including genomics, personal habits and preferences or allergies. Diet4You is a hybrid system with a complex integration of artificial intelligence and analytic components, able to compose complete personalized menus, for a certain period of time. The Personal Menu Planner (PMP) is the specific component choosing the dishes to be proposed in the solution. In this work, a new component is developed to introduce possible restrictions specified by the nutritionist. There are many situations where the diet of a person is limited depending on his/her condition, allergies or personal decisions. Therefore, the new PMP obtains a menu that satisfies both the nutritional plan and the specified restrictions.