Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tafeit, Erwin

Titel

The development of a diet-plan-generating algorithm and its implementation on an IBM/PC

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

1987

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It is not easy and it takes a long time to create an individual diet plan, which depends on the personal and medical data of the patient. To be effective, the diet plan must supply the patient with all necessary components, for example vitamins and calories. On the other hand there are some substances, depending on the kind of disease, from which the patient may get only a fixed quantity a day and not more. To solve the problem you can give to the patient a special dietbook, including complete meals with receipts and quantity analyses, and you can tell him to find out the right meals himself. This is difficult for the patient and the results are often bad. Therefore the wish existed to use mathematical methods and computers to do that work for the patient. The most simple way to get a diet plan for about one month and about four meals a day is to take one hundred different meals out of suitable dietbooks and combine every breakfast with every lunch, every snack and every supper, computing the quantities of the important substances. Whenever the result of these computations are well, you receive one day of your diet plan. This algorithm brings good results but the computation of one diet plan for one month lasts for several hours, because there are many possible combinations. Therefore it was our work to develop an algorithm, which brings results with the same quality, but very much faster. The Algorithm should also satisfy the following conditions: (1) It should be able to regulate up to six different substances; (2) It should be possible to limit the repetition of the same meal within a diet plan of one month; (3) The patient can select if he wants three, four or five meals a day. Finally it was possible to develop such an algorithm, which brings results with a various time-expense from some seconds up to a maximum of about nine minutes for an individual diet plan for one month.