Personalised Nutrition for Healthy Living: The PROTEIN project

Abstract

Personalised nutrition is a novel public health strategy aiming to promote positive diet and lifestyle changes. Tailored dietary and physical activity advice may be more appropriate than a generalised "one-size-fits-all" approach as it is more biologically relevant to the individual. Information and computing technology, smartphones and mobile applications have become an integral part of modern life and thereby present the opportunity for novel methods to encourage individuals to lead a healthier lifestyle. This article introduces the European Union-funded PROTEIN project (PeRsOnalised nutriTion for hEalthy livINg) consortium and introduces the associated work packages. The primary objective of the PROTEIN project is to produce a novel adaptable mobile application suite based on sound nutrition and physical activity advice from experts in their field, accessible to all population groups, with differing health outcomes, whose behaviour can be tracked with a variety of sensors and health hazard perception. The mobile application "ecosystem" that will be developed by the consortium includes a platform, mobile suite, cloud services, artificial intelligence advisor, game suite, modelling of expert's knowledge, users' behaviour data collection, data analysis and a dashboard for healthcare professionals. It is proposed that users will find the provision of personalised nutrition advice and real-time data capture through a smartphone application useful, and importantly, will be encouraged by this to make positive health behaviour changes.