Introduction: Lifestyle assessment, especially nutrition counseling may have a great impact on the health state of everybody. The MenuGene expert system provides services for the logging and assessment of nutrition and physical activity.
Aim: This paper focuses on how the harmony of a dietary log can be analyzed using harmony rules. Such an assessment can be used to assess a log as well as drive an evolutionary search process that constructs a personalized menu.
Methods: Expert knowledge is formalized in two parts, sets of foods and dishes and rules that fire at a pre-defined pattern of sets. To tackle the large rule search space, a simple conflict resolution strategy is used.
Results: We implemented several hierarchies of sets to support the definition of rules, and also an Android based lifestyle assistant application. We validated the completeness of the dietary database in a survey.
Conclusion: The system may prove very useful for a real improvement of the quality of life and general health state especially for patients with chronic diseases like diabetes. We plan to conduct clinical trials to prove this early next year.