Can a Chatbot Determine My Diet?: Addressing Challenges of Chatbot Application for Meal Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper explores the development of chatbots for personalized meal recommendations, addressing technical, behavioral, and social challenges, and proposes a comprehensive pipeline for creating effective nutrition-support chatbots.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed pipeline guideline for building robust chatbots tailored for healthy nutrition advice, considering multidisciplinary challenges.

Findings

Identified key challenges in chatbot-based nutrition advice

Proposed a comprehensive development pipeline

Provided guidelines for robust chatbot implementation

Abstract

Poor nutrition can lead to reduced immunity, increased susceptibility to disease, impaired physical and mental development, and reduced productivity. A conversational agent can support people as a virtual coach, however building such systems still have its associated challenges and limitations. This paper describes the background and motivation for chatbot systems in the context of healthy nutrition recommendation. We discuss current challenges associated with chatbot application, we tackled technical, theoretical, behavioural, and social aspects of the challenges. We then propose a pipeline to be used as guidelines by developers to implement theoretically and technically robust chatbot systems.