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The goal of this research is to use artificial intelligence technologies to provide automatic meal plans that benefit the health of people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). AD is the most common form of dementia. It results in progressive changes to the brain, cognitive function, and eventually to everyday activities (Raskin et al., 2015). It starts gradually with early signs including patchy memory loss and subtle changes in behavior. The disease is progressively proceeding; the patient may need aid in all aspects of personal care including their daily diet. AD is complex, and it is unlikely that any one drug or other intervention will successfully treat it. Alternative treatments have been applied to improve the patient’s brain and general health. One of these efforts includes providing AD patients with proper food and nutrition. Diet has a long time effect on AD, but it is not noticeable in a short time. For AD patients, poor nutrition can significantly raise behavioral symptoms and cause weight loss (Pivi et al., 2012). Healthy meal planning is important to maintain a healthy lifestyle, especially for AD patients with other diet-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure. Besides providing healthy and nourishing meal options, planning meals can help caregivers of AD save time in meal preparation and take away the stress of figuring out meals daily.
Nowadays, there are many online resources about healthy eating. For example, many websites such as the Alzheimer’s Association (Adopt a Healthy Diet), the National Institute on Aging (Healthy Meal Planning: Tips for Older Adults), and the Mayo Clinic (Roth, 2018; Staff, 2019) has valuable knowledge on diet and AD. Recently, mobile applications have been introduced such as Inc. and MyFoodDiaryfood databases and search engines that track and calculate nutrition and calories to assist with meal planning. Although these information sources and tools are available, meal planning for AD users is still challenging for several reasons. First, with the overwhelming amount of online information, it is difficult for a busy caregiver to decide exactly what is best for the patient he or she is taking care of. Moreover, it is not easy for an unprofessional caregiver to remember all the health guidelines and constraints, and then apply them in their daily care routine. Secondly, the meal plans and recommendations provided by existing applications tend to be generic, and do not consider a specific patient’s preferences, multiple health conditions, culture, and traditions. In addition, they do not consider a caregiver’s time limits to prepare the meal and economic status to afford the food items. Most importantly, there is no automated meal planner specifically targeting the population of AD. General meal planning applications could not be directly applied to AD users as their planning is mainly based on meal nutrition regulations. Based on recent research on AD diet (Liu et al., 2021), appropriate meals for AD patients should focus on food ingredients. For example, instead of recommending a certain amount of protein and fiber in a meal, an AD diet should emphasize the sources of protein and fiber, for example, whether the protein is from beef or fish, the fiber from green vegetables or supplements. Currently, this issue is not effectively considered and addressed by existing meal planning systems.