Interactive engine to provide personal recommendations for nutrition, to help the general public to live a balanced healthier lifestyle

Abstract

An algorithm and method to provide personal recommendations for nutrition based on preferences, habits, medical and activity profiles for users, and constraints. The algorithm can also be fed and takes into account real-time feedback from the user. The method allows creating a personal nutritional schedule based on a set of constraints, which are solved using an optimization algorithm to find the diet best fitting each user. The method also includes analyzing a single user by applying various statistical techniques, enabling the algorithm to infer the user's preferences and updating of the constraints, analyzing and clustering of the general user population based on statistical principles, giving the algorithm insightful information and allowing improved performance by means of “machine-learning,” and creating a list of recommended food items / recipes to help users live a balanced, healthier lifestyle.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention relates to nutrition. More particularly, it is an algorithm that provides personalized meal plans for individuals in real-time, in order to help the general public to live a balanced & healthier lifestyle.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]There is currently no system known to the present inventors that produces nutritional recommendations based on personal needs either in academia or in the industry.Diet Planning:[0003]Today, diet planning is done in various ways. It may typically be classified in one of two categories: diets that are done and / or recommended by professional nutritionists, physicians or health experts and other “Crash Diet.” The latter are diets that are performed by individuals who are seeking immediate results and often involve consumption of special foods, typically in the form of shakes; medicine, in the form of pills, or even extreme rapid changes in food consumption that deviate from the general guidelines given ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The patent describes a method and application for providing personal recommendations for nutrition based on the preferences, medical and activity profiles of multiple users. The algorithm utilizes "personal" modules that interact with a single user and "global" modules that analyze the data of all users simultaneously. The method involves installing the application on various computing devices and creating a personal nutrional schedule based on a set of constraints that are solved using an optimization algorithm. The platform analyzes the user's input and behavior to extrapolate their preferences and improve the suggestions provided to them. The technical effect of the patent is a more efficient and effective tool for providing personalized nutrition advice to users based on their unique needs and lifestyles.

Problems solved by technology

Statistically, most diets fail due to the enormous change in lifestyle they require from the dieter in a short time-scale.

Indeed, most people don't have the willpower to completely change the habits they acquired over many years of eating in a certain way.

1. Human experts cannot continuously follow the person they are serving: their actual food consumption (if they divert from the proposed diet), physical activity and habits. Additionally, unless a nutritionist is meeting with his / her client on a daily basis, it is extremely difficult for a nutritionist to continuously change the proposed diet based on the user's reaction to it.

2. A human nutritionist works with a very basic set of rules, and does not take into account all the different factors. Indeed, the human body is a very complex system. This forces them to make simplifying assumptions to provide food recommendations, e.g. assuming that absorption of nutrients is linear, namely that a consumption of one nutrient does not affect the consumption of another. Nevertheless, this is known to be false in certain limits. For example, exaggerated consumption of animal protein requires affects the absorption of calcium in the body.

3. Most importantly, the output from a typical nutritionist session is a basic daily / weekly calendar with the food items the client should consume each day. This will definitely hinder the client's ability to follow the nutritional plan they receive from the nutritionist as the dieter won't always know what kind of changes he / she may make on-the-go.

4. A nutritionist is by definition a human participant, which is both expensive and error prone.

5. Many nutritionists have different training, which may lead to contradictory advice. For instance, one nutritionist may believe in a “low carbs” (Atkins) diet, while another may stick to a more conservative one.

6. Many people switch nutritionists over time, thus loosing the consistency of their diet and making further failure in dieting even more probable.

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