A DASH Diet Recommendation System for Hypertensive Patients Using Machine Learning

Hypertension is becoming a serious health issue in the world. People tend to have a busy lifestyle and to adopt unhealthy diets. Due to poor eating habits, the rate of Non Communicable Diseases (NCDs) such as hypertension together with the rate of death caused by such diseases are rising. In order to promote healthy eating habits in Mauritius, the paper proposes a DASH diet recommender system that recommends healthy Mauritian diet plans to hypertensive patients. The system consists of a recommendation engine that uses techniques such as content-based filtering along with machine learning algorithms to recommend personalized diet plans to hypertensive patients based on factors such as age, user preferences about food, allergies, smoking level, alcohol level, blood pressure level and dietary intake. The system makes use of a mobile application which is handy and quick to use. Based on a survey carried out, the application has helped users to control and reduce their BP level.