Profile-based system for nutritional information management

Nowadays health concerns are effectively becoming ubiquitous. Most people have the need to effectively control their nutritional consumptions, mostly due to health issues. Personal computational devices may assist this control with a solution that allows an efficient management of each individual nutritional profile. In this work we propose a mobile service architecture that allows users to manage their nutritional information, using a profile-based system and build shopping lists based on the user's profiles. This application may contribute to the improvement of the lifestyle of the population through the recommendation of food and drinks that fit their profile of restrictions and/or nutritional options (for instance, due to hypertension or obesity, among others). The person's profile can be accessed and configured on a mobile device. A set of predefined templates provides the initial rules that may be customized to represent specific individual nutrition rules. The rules defined in the profile can later be used to filter the food presented to each user. The paper includes preliminary usability results from experiments using real data to validate the approach. These results suggest it could be used in real scenarios, although it may require more than simply filtering results.