DIETOS: A recommender system for adaptive diet monitoring and personalized food suggestion

Nowadays there is a widespread diffusion of mobile applications for weight and diet management. Even though, the most popular apps are not usually experimented in clinical contexts, as well as apps are not supported by medical evidence. Further research is necessary to assess the effectiveness of apps for weight and diet management. Moreover, there are few examples of food recommender systems that provide to the users nutritional facts about suitable food choices and take into account individual physiological status and environmental situations. We propose DIETOS (DIET Organizer System), a recommender system for the adaptive delivery of nutrition contents to improve the quality of life of both healthy people and individuals affected by chronic diet-related diseases. The proposed system is able to build a user's health profile, and provides individualized nutritional recommendation according to the health profile. The profile is created through the use of dynamic real-time questionnaires prepared by medical doctors and compiled by the users. The health profile includes information about health status and eventual chronic diseases. The first prototype of the system (available online at http://www.easyanalysis.it/dietos), includes a catalogue of typical Calabrian foods compiled by nutrition specialists (Calabria is a region of the southern Italy). DIETOS can suggest not only the use of specific foods compatible with the health status, but also it may give dietary indications related to some specific pathologies or health conditions.