Developing a decision support system to determine carbohydrate intake of diabetic patients

The use of telecommunication methods for healthcare purposes is nowadays inevitable to provide satisfactory service. This article introduces and investigates the concept of a decision support system using telemedicine solutions, namely supporting the medical staff and the patient to treat diabetes by determining diet plans and monitoring food consumption (focusing on carbohydrate intake). The system's requirements are to support the monitoring of the patient's well-being, making a choice on the right therapy, the identification of deterioration of health and alert before the patient's situation gets worse. After summarizing the currently existing diet planning systems, the current article focuses on the presentation of the preliminary work, an application developed by Healthcare Technologies Knowledge Centre of Budapest University of Technology and Economics and the Dept. of Control Engineering and Information Technology. The article introduces in detail the homecare supporting system which is the base of the application, the next steps of the specification and the existing literature. Along with present tasks the future plans are also presented.