WebDietAID: an interactive Web-based nutritional counselor.

WebDietAID is a Web-based system aimed at assisting individuals affected by high serum cholesterol. The system tries to reproduce the types of intervention performed by a nutritional counselor. It is structured as a set of advisors, each of which handles a different side of the counseling process. The tasks of the advisors range from monitoring weight, to teaching about healthy nutrition, to assessing motivation and psychological obstacles to behavior change. WebDietAID is based on a development environment for Web-based applications that includes a dynamical Web server, a knowledge base management system, and an interface to a relational database. We describe the architecture of the system, and several of the implemented advisors. Finally, we discuss how the architecture could be generalized to other counseling domains.