ChefMySelf Assistent Solution for improving cooking skills and nutritional kwoledge for Independent Elders

The ChefMySelf project main goal is to develop a customizable, open and extensible (ICT) service ecosystem built around an automatic cooking solution to support elderly people preparing meals and maintaining healthy eating habits. A food processor with an accessible interface, specially tailored for the elderly, will encourage them to self-care, accordingly to their particular nutrition requirements. At the same time a social network, focused on the topic of healthy aging and eating, will become a tool to motivate them to be active and maintaining existing social relationships and creating new ones.The cloud based services will offer a suite of applications for the care of elderly nutrition and its support through the consultation of a complete reference of recipes. Other features, such as the review of daily caloric consumption, vitamins and minerals intake, will allow the user to take control of his/her eating. The services will be accessible by the elders through two different interfaces: one TV with a set top box and a tablet device. Furthermore, a common food processor will be enhanced and coupled with these services to assist the elders during the preparation of meals. This assistant will consist on a common food processor connected to the Internet with a specific designed cooking interface to guide the user on the meal preparation, receiving a selected recipe from one of the devices which will act as the primary user interfaces (tablet/set top box). In this manner, the ChefMySelf solution will support elderly people preventing possible malnutrition risks. ChefMySelf also aims to increase the motivation of the seniors to carry out daily activities, as cooking, for instance, in addition to self-monitoring on the lifestyle habit. This is an important aspect of the project, as it is proven that daily activities slow down the mental and physical decline. In order to enhance the motivating effect and social interaction, ChefMySelf also includes a set of social services to publish and comment recipes or send (audio) messages to other users. However, the service ecosystem will not be limited to the outlined activities, but will also offer a public Application Programming Interface (API) for third parties which want to extend the ChefMySelf service ecosystem. An example for a service using the public API is a scale service, which will be used to monitor the weight of the elders and update their user context. Also it will demonstrate how other devices can be integrated into the system in order to provide new functionalities or enhance the user context with additional information. The primary focus of the envisioned solution is to increase the motivation of elders for health eating: Firstly by supporting them to eat well and healthy and secondly by performing activities through the participation in virtual social networks. The cooking activities support directly their eating habits, avoiding nutritional problems related to aging. To achieve the overall aim of ChefMySelf project the following operative objectives are identified: 1) Development of a context aware, recipe library: A human and machine readable, context aware library of recipes will be created, specifying the preparation of different meals. The library will be based on semantic technologies and using machine learning techniques to enable features like: Advanced reasoning based on the user context, Advanced ways to reach the recipes,Learning of user preferences,Context aware ranking of recipes, Automatic diet planning. 2) Promote daily activities of elderly with the special focus on health eating habits: The ChefMySelf solution will support regular activities of the elderly users by offering them: Preparation assistant,Shopping assistance, Review of the meal history. 3) Motivation through participation on a virtual social network: To motivate the users in adopting healthy eating habits the ChefMySelf solution will offer a virtual social network component, specially tailored to the need of the targeted audience. The solution is going to be validated in two countries: Italy and The Netherlands, that will assure the EU dimension of the solution proposed in addition of being sure that the solution will merge needs of elderly and will respect their requests. Organisations from Poland, Portugal and Spain also particpated in the project.