A mobile nutritional application for assessing patient risk and improving dietary habits

The support of Information Technology for outpatients increased in the past few years with the development of mobile technology (mHealth). Apps on smartphones/tablets represent an excellent way of planning/monitoring dietary habits in young patients affected by obesity or diabetes. Apps for diet monitoring are also helpful for vulnerable adults or elderly people since dietary habits represent modifiable risk factors associated with the development and progression of many diseases. Several studies are reported in the literature confirming that mHealth has the potential for improving patient health compared with standard outpatient care. However, there is still limited evidence about their effectiveness in overall clinical outcomes. Thus, further research using valid outcome measures and rigorous design in more targeted and longer-term studies are required.

• Detailed analysis and feasibility study (M1-M6): detailed analysis of the application context of the project, analysis of the technological state of the art and definition of the technical-functional specifications in terms of needs and regulations; feasibility study of the integrated solution.
• Design (M5-M12): technological/functional architecture design of the components of the system; modular/configurable software architecture design (client/server); definition of the Graphical User Interfaces (GUI); definition of security and privacy procedures and protocols; definition of algorithms, test case definition.
• Development (M9-M18): SW implementation of the prototype; bug fixing iterations.
• Pilot (M18-M36): pre-pilot tests and final exploitation in the pilot clinical studies.
• Dissemination of results (M24–M36): Dissemination of the results and evaluating plans for a possible prosecution of the project after the official end.

Design of an ICT database for integrating data from different sources: social, environmental, lifestyle, actual dietary patterns, nutritional status, biochemical and omics data. The database will be shaped after standard terminology concepts currently used to represent clinical information. Definition of semantic relationships within the database allow querying data from different perspectives.

Design of a user-friendly personalized web responsive application for monitoring dietary habits. The responsiveness features of the application make it available on different devices (e.g., PC, smartphone, tablet).

Implementation of an application promoting and monitoring sustainable target specific dietary patterns. This includes prototyping of foods, supplements, ingredients and nutraceuticals aimed at restoring resilience in specific targets affected by malnutrition. The application will propose sustainable dietary patterns tailored to the target.