Development of Decision Support System Platform for Daily Dietary Plan

Abstract

Background: Solving health issues needs accurate and significant information regarding food consumption. Recently, data analysis and communication have provided outstanding and robust approaches to fulfill the necessity of scientific information and help in decisionmaking in many fields. Many evidence has reported that with little information, better decisions could be achieved. Objective: This research aimed to develop the Decision Support System (DSS) for the daily dietary plan to practically help users in food consumption and health care. Methods: The system consists of 1,940 cuisine items, including Thai and English menus. In this system, the user can set the daily dietary plan by selecting menu items with food-specific and total calories. Overall calories of selected menu items would be calculated automatically. The user can see the normal range of calories required based on gender with the help of the baseline (normal office person). Results: This system can help users to become familiar with a better daily dietary plan, food calories, and health care easily. Furthermore, experts (doctors) can improve their learning experiences by formulating and adjusting the Decision Support System (DSS) for patients in special need. The easiness and usefulness of this system are evaluated by 119 users using a Likert scale (1=least, 5=most). The result, on average, is noted to be 4.58. Conclusion: The Decision Support System (DSS) is developed for the daily dietary plan. The accessibility to the system is via personal computer (PC), smartphone, and tablet with an internet connection. For future work, this DSS can improve by connecting the platform with health care providers via sharing the data for more online support.