SousChef: Improved meal recommender system for Portuguese older adults

Abstract

Continuing efforts to increase the relevance and effectiveness of nutritional recommendations are essential to promote long-term biological effects. Several studies refer that older adults often struggle with making the right decisions regarding meal preparation, healthy diets or groceries shopping. In this work research on user needs are presented, where different stakeholders were listened concerning their needs and perspectives within the domain of nutrition in older adults. Moreover, an improved version of SousChef, a meal recommender system is here presented, where new heuristics were added to the system and the users can now choose between 4 to 6 meals to be planned per day. Since another important factor besides nutrition and food preferences impact food choice concerns with the budget, new heuristics were considered in order to reduce waste and shortening the shopping list. Also new heuristics were added to the system to better reflect the Portuguese nutritional guidelines and information about food prices in order foster reducing waste and shortening one’s shopping list. The nutritional recommendations and the application was thought and designed for older adults, presenting friendly user interfaces and following the guidelines of a nutritionist.