Dealing with Malnutrition: A Meal Planning System for Elderly

Argumentation for Consumers of Healthcare

Volume

Papers from the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Malnutrition is a serious problem among people of old age. To overcome malnutrition, a change of food consumption behaviour is necessary, which needs to be based on specialist advice from health-care professionals. Changing food-related behaviour, however, is known to be difficult. Our approach to this problem is to provide an intelligent meal planning system to be used by the elderly person in his or her home. The system provides recommendations of suitable food recipes, taking into account the advice of the care givers (e.g. in terms of dietary restrictions, suitable energy and fat levels, etc). We describe the requirements, design, algorithms, and user interface of the system, and discuss ongoing and future work.