Dynamic Diet Planner: A Personal Diet Recommender System Based on Daily Activity and Physical Condition

Abstract Background and Objectives At the beginning of human civilization, human being needs to undergo immense physical labor to survive. During those days high-calorie diet was essential. However, the evolution of technology has changed the scenario and much lesser amount of physical labor is required to survive in modern hi-tech days, requiring less amount of calorie. The excess calorie gets deposited in the body in the form of white fat. As a consequence, obesity appears as an epidemic all over the world. Long term obesity causes many diseases like heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and many other ailments. It is tough for people, who honestly want to check their obesity by controlling food habits, to continue a static diet chart with fixed restricted foods for a long time. Most of the time, people give up such restrictions on food. It will be very useful if a system exists, that will generate a dynamic diet chart based on calorie spend by the body. Methods This research describes a system that will generate a dynamic diet chart based on calorie spend by the body and other data like user's BMI, food preferences, etc. In this system, user can tailor his/her diet chart by changing daily physical activities (activities that burn calories). The main contributions of the proposed system are as follows: • A dedicated hardware system to quantify physical labor during walking and running throughout the day from feet pressure changes along with walk cycle detection. • The proposed hardware system can distinguish between walk and run. • A dynamic diet chart preparation system, where the user has the provision to plan his/her diet chart with food affinity. The entire work is divided into two modules; the first one focuses on the hardware design to detect and quantify physical activities during “walking” and “running”. These data are used in the second part. The second part contains calorie calculation along with the preparation of a dynamic diet chart with food affinity. In the hardware design, an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) is proposed to measure the physical activity during “walking” and “running”. Result At the time of hardware logic synthesis, VHDL and FPGA are used. Experimental results show that the proposed hardware provides more accurate results than a pedometer. There is no standard metric to measure the performance of the dynamic diet chart generation system. Competency of the dietitian at the time of setting the parameters, honesty of the users at the time of the interactive session, etc. are the main factors that influence heavily the performance of the dynamic diet chart preparation system. The advantage of dynamic diet chart is that users can modify the diet menu as per their wish, and the system generates a diet chart in such a way that calorie intake (through food items) is maintained properly. In addition to this, the user can plan his future meals. Discussion This work is an interdisciplinary work. It is a blending of electronics (FSM), design, and computation for decision making; the computation portion includes software engineering, soft computing, etc. Future plan of this work is to integrate this system with “Cloud” to provide different data analysis related services, like region-wise food habit pattern prediction, health-related statistics, etc.