Page 360 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS1080 Karina G. et al.

1. Introduction
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 a large number of chronic diseases, but also contributes
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 (financed by Spanish government) proposes the
creation of an intelligent decision support System oriented to the adaptive
and dynamic preparation of personalized diets for the specific individuals in
general population, having, or not, one or more diseases. The diets are built
by taking into account all the information available on the person, including
the characteristics of the person itself, their health conditions, their habits and
eventual drugs intake and their genòmic information. Authors are not aware
of other Systems considering all these factors together for the menus
recommendations. The Diet4You tool is a hybrid system interacting several
components in a complex way. One of those components is a subsystem able
to identify dietary patterns of the persons by using multiview clustering for
heterogeneous variables, connected with some automatic class interpretation
tools that provides a clear description of the patterns to nutritionists, who
doesn’t necessarily have technical skills. The paper shows how a data science
approach helps to establish a reference set of prototypical dietary paterns as
a starting point to establish the behaviour of the complete Diet4you System.
Also, a CBR component, based on Knn with som especial distances helps to
provide adaptive behaviour to the System, which includes as well, some
knowledge based modules.

2. Methodology and structure of the system
2.1 Structure of the system
The Diet4You system is composed of two main blocks (see Figure 1):
1. A Nutritional Plan Generator (NPG). This part of the system is designed
to return a nutritional plan given personal specifications. The NPG
receives the following pieces of information as input:
• Dietary profiles that can be prescribed to certain types of persons with
certain genetic characteristics and lifestyle habits, and the pattern of
expected diet effects in those scenarios.
• Expert knowledge including Daily Reference Intakes (DRIs) of
micronutrients and trace elements; the Recommended Daily Allowance
(RDA) of macronutrients; and nutritional and institutional
recommendations, such as those provided by the OMS.

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